The Challenge

Conceive, design, and develop a smarter system — not a website.

The University of Kansas Health System (TUKHS) selected Primacy to re-design their site and upgrade their content management system (CMS) to Sitecore 9. And, because TUKHS has several uniquely branded institutions, the underlying code base had to accommodate for designs that had not yet been conceived.

The Insight

Even great projects cause headaches. The remedy is preparation.

Re-imagining a comprehensive system-wide site experience (along with a major CMS upgrade) is complex and risky. Multiple stakeholders, different agendas, and an accelerated timeline added to the anxiety. The first step: prepare TUKHS’s core team, content developers and technologists for the unfamiliar, often stressful road ahead.

Laptop displaying TUKHS website.

The Research

There’s more to a site than meets the eye — in this case, other sites.

Primacy’s cross-disciplinary team outlined the project approach and roadmap for success — including proposed deliverables, milestones and research initiatives. We created surveys, conducted usability testing, reviewed third party research and analyzed site traffic. Importantly, during conversations with TUKHS executive leadership, we helped uncover the need for TUKHS’s significant investment in the CMS upgrade to go much further than a single website build — so we modified our approach.

Smarter Experience

If you want success, prepare for disaster.

At the outset of complex projects such as TUKHS, we create simple archetypes to represent the different client stakeholders. In addition, we develop simple journey maps as a method for better understanding the motivations and pressures facing our clients. Furthermore, we conduct unique workshops, such as a “pre-Mortem” exercises to help us predict and avoid issues that could arise. In this instance, we identified the critical need for TUKHS to take an iterative approach to site launches given their limited resources and aggressive timelines.

Tilted screens showing TUKHS website.
TUKHS wireframes.
Mobile version of TUKHS website.

The Outcome

Designed for flexibility, built to iterate.

Our Design, Data and Technology teams worked closely together with TUKHS to prioritize and document a wide array of business, design and system requirements. Together we created a rich, foundational library of accessible templates and content modules that was used to create TUKHS's main site. Shortly after, the easily modified templates and content modules formed the basis for the first sub-site launch for the University of Kansas Cancer Center. The unique design of the Cancer Center site is clearly distinct from the TUKHS look and feel, but has the same “code-DNA” of the parent site.