Ramsay Health Care | Reducing time-to-task

Context

While interning at Ramsay Health Care, one of Australia’s leading private healthcare providers, I was tasked with improving the usability of their national websites. Ramsay operates hospitals across Australia, the UK, and Europe, and I worked from their Australian headquarters to develop a solution that could be applied across all Australian hospital sites. As part of this, I partially coded a new navigation system to demonstrate its feasibility and ease of implementation.

Discover

Competitive Analysis

To better understand the landscape of regional hospital websites, I conducted a competitive analysis of key Ramsay competitors as well as Ramsay’s own international sites. Additionally, I completed a heuristic evaluation, comparing Ramsay’s national hospital websites to other hospital websites to identify usability gaps and opportunities.

Key Insights

Through my competitive analysis, I found that Ramsay’s national websites had a more convoluted navigation structure and an excessive number of pages compared to other hospital websites, making it harder to find important information and increasing the time it took to navigate between pages.

Define

Navigation Analysis

I documented the navigation structures of 18 hospital websites—spanning small, medium, and large hospitals, using Excel to compare patterns across different site sizes. For each of these sites, I reviewed Google Analytics data to identify which links were frequently used, occasionally used, or never used. Eight of these sites are listed below with their navigation structures.

Synthesis

I removed all links labeled as “Never Used” and some “Sometimes Used” links that appeared to be clicked accidentally. I retained all links that were frequently used or “Sometimes Used” but appeared intentional.

From this, I was able to group the remaining links into two key themes: “Information about the Hospital” and “Information about a Visit.” These became the basis for two clear sections in the navigation: “Our Hospital” and “Coming to Hospital.”

Because specialists, procedures, and services vary between hospitals, I ensured the navigation design could flexibly accommodate these differences, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all structure.

Develop

Design

I began by sketching rough navigation concepts inspired by competitor sites and design examples from Dribbble.

Wireflow

I began wireframing a flexible template that could be applied across all Australian Ramsay Health Care hospital websites. My personal sketch concepts, along with insights from competitor analysis, informed the wireframe design. I then presented the wireflow to the UX team to gather feedback before moving into a higher-fidelity design.

Deliver

Mock-up

Using Ramsay’s style guide, I presented my simple yet effective design changes to the team. These focused primarily on improving navigation—introducing a double navigation bar, relocating the “Careers” link to the footer, and adding a persistent, high-visibility “Emergency” button outside the nav. Additionally, I proposed a navigation structure for sections like specialists, services and procedures which change dramatically from hospital to hospital, where they are available in a side nav.

Additionally, I provided a report with broader recommendations to reduce time-to-task, including minimizing on-screen text, offering more downloadable resources, and improving access to frequently used information.

Navigation Prototype

I partially coded the navigation to demonstrate its feasibility and show that the change was technically straightforward.

Next Steps

With more time, I would have applied my design principles across the entire site and created templates that regional hospitals could easily implement. Given the availability of tools like Squarespace and Webflow, rolling out a consistent, national template would be both feasible and scalable.