Taking over a healthcare redesign mid-flight, with wary stakeholders watching
A national homeopathy clinic chain in India needed a responsive website that ranked well and kept people reading. The project was already running under someone else when it was handed to me, and the stakeholders were wary of the change. I used Microsoft Clarity and Google Analytics to find where engagement dropped, aligned the design with the SEO team's keyword strategy, and rebuilt the content into a story patients could follow. The stakeholders accepted the rationale, only a few screens needed rethinking, and we finished in a short timeline.
Situation
A national homeopathy clinic chain in India wanted a responsive website that would rank in search and hold attention once people arrived. The redesign was SEO-led, so search strategy and design had to work as one.
Complication
Three things made it harder than a normal redesign.
- I inherited it. Someone else had been leading the project, and then it was handed over. A change of lead mid-project reads as risk, and the stakeholders were not very receptive at first.
- The seam between search and design. SEO-led projects often fail where keyword strategy meets layout. Each side can quietly undo the other.
- Important content is not always appealing. Some of the most important information on a healthcare site is the least visual. It has to be packaged so people keep reading.
The question
How do you earn trust in a project you did not start, fast enough to finish it on time?
The answer, in four moves
1. Start from where people drop off. My hands-on work began in the data. Microsoft Clarity showed what was wrong on the existing site and where engagement was low. Google Analytics showed which pages carried the most traffic. Together they pointed at the pages worth redesigning first, and at the changes most likely to raise engagement and conversion.
2. Agree the SEO structure before any layout ships. We worked with the SEO team to agree the keywords, the page sections, the length of content, and how content would spread across each page based on those keywords. Design then worked inside that structure instead of against it.
3. Turn hard content into a story. We looked at what people search for and ask about most: forum discussions, common queries, and the SEO data on popular keywords. That decided what belonged at the top of a page and what could sit lower. We built a narrative around the content, so each page reads as one connected story rather than a stack of facts. The whole site was designed to be responsive.
4. Win with rationale, not authority. I presented every design with its reasoning. The stakeholders had questions and challenges, and I answered them. Based on those answers, we moved forward.
How I ran the team
- I owned: the UX and design direction, the data analysis, the design rationale, and the conversations with stakeholders.
- Led through others: I directed the senior designer, and the senior designer managed the junior designer day to day. It kept me in the decisions without taking the growth opportunity away from either of them.
- Partnered with: the SEO team, on keywords, sections, content length and how content was distributed across pages.
Result
- The handover landed. Stakeholders who were wary of a new lead accepted the design direction.
- Few rewrites. Only a handful of designs needed to be reworked after review.
- Fast delivery. The redesign was completed in a very short period.
Three things I took with me
- Two data sources beat one. Clarity shows the behaviour. Analytics shows where it matters.
- Agree the SEO structure first, then design inside it.
- Hard content needs a narrative. Order it by what people actually ask.
Want the longer version of this story?
I can walk you through the decisions, the trade-offs and what I would do next.