Balancing consistency and flexibility with Lifecare.

Lifecare is a leading network of physiotherapy and healthcare clinics, specialising in a wide range of holistic health services that support communities all over the country.

Whether it’s preventative or rehabilitative, physiotherapy is often about striving for the right balance of stability and flexibility.

Fittingly, that’s exactly what the Lifecare team hoped to achieve throughout our recent collaboration.

Largely, the Lifecare team were looking for stability through consolidation—transitioning 35 individualised clinic websites from SquareSpace to one single, consistent platform—and the flexibility for those individual clinics to retain the value of their local, community-based personalities.

Hitting the right balance creates a number of knock-on benefits for patients, practitioners, and Lifecare staff alike.

First up, the new solution massages out the inconsistencies and effort associated with maintaining such a disparate spread of sites. Revised search and booking functionalities mean it’s now easier for people to find their closest clinic and make an appointment.

There’s also a more cohesive sense of Lifecare as an organisation and consistency around service terminologies. And, it’s quick and convenient to make updates: both for local clinic staff, and the broader Lifecare team.

Early consultation: pinpoint the pain points.

By getting together early in the process—with key stakeholders from throughout Lifecare—we were able to catalogue and diagnose the existing challenges and identify opportunities to push for improvements beyond the initial brief.

Reconstructing the brief to transform challenges into opportunities.

In addition to consolidating 35 individualised clinic websites, there were some other interesting complexities to manage throughout the project.

For one, integrating three different booking platforms in the transition from Health Engine—Australia’s largest online appointment booking service—to Nookal. There was also the heavy lifting associated with auditing and migrating nearly 1,500 pre-existing content pages.

Plus, multiple Lifecare stakeholders, stationed all across the country, to consider and bring on the journey.

‘From discovery through to deployment, the team at August put in 100% to deliver a website that ticks all the boxes.’

– Monica Wallace, Marketing Manager at Lifecare.

Alongside the website project, Lifecare were in the process of reworking their digital brand assets to revitalise their colour palettes, typography styles, photography, and more.

The building blocks of a brand: Lifecare’s revitalised design system.

To align with new brand elements on the way, the team co-designed a comprehensive treatment plan to make any practitioner proud, with a clear path to success and a shared understanding of how to get the new solution fit and firing.

From pencil…

…to more polished design concepts, iterating along the way.

Bringing Lifecare to life, online.

Lifecare offers a dual proposition for patients: the highest quality clinical treatments from local practitioners that work in the community, for the community.

We wanted to reflect that duality by showcasing clinics in a visual language that’s clean, clear and modern, but with a sense of personal warmth, energy and vitality.

Scroll-triggered graphical elements and image animations ensure a subtle sense of movement and mobility is implied while people navigate the site.

The search functionality is particularly critical, so the team created detailed user journey maps to plot each patient’s potential experience in discovering the brand and engaging with the website. Then, we conducted collaborative ‘design sprints’ to ensure a seamless solution in facilitating those potential journeys.

For example, a series of stepped microinteractions ensure you get a broad view of Lifecare’s national network, while ensuring your closest clinic is only ever one or two clicks away.

Your closest Lifecare clinic is never any more than a few clicks away.

Once you’ve chosen the right Lifecare clinic for you, you’ll get a sense of the location’s personality through localised content, staff profiles, articles penned by the practitioners themselves, and a range of other insights.

Just because Lifecare has a national physiology with a network across the country, doesn’t mean they can’t retain the valuable sense of community that helps make the treatment experience more comfortable and personalised.

‘August’s partnership and drive to exceed expectations has helped to push our brand in a new and exciting direction for our staff and patients alike.’

– Monica Wallace, Marketing Manager at Lifecare.

Head over now to the new Lifecare site to see how we found the right balance for a national organisation with a local personality.