Best Practices of Clinical Trial Web Design for Enhanced User Engagement

Clinical trials are complex projects executed in multiple parts that require intense planning, organization, coordination, and discipline. Ensuring the safety of new treatments and eliminating doubts about involved risks before they go public is a challenging task. Additionally, clinical trials are time-consuming. The associated complexities also make it difficult for pharmaceutical companies to recruit trial participants. While clinical trial websites can play a critical role in overcoming the same, most online websites lack features like accessibility, transparency, compliance, etc. These make it difficult for pharmaceutical companies to streamline participant recruitment, data collection, and overall trial efficiency. A web design company involved in designing or upgrading a clinical trial website has to overcome these challenges on priority to enhance the functionality of its web design. 

Importance of the role played by a web design company in clinical trial website building

A clinical trial is a high-stake game for a pharmaceutical company. Around 40% of their research budget is allocated for clinical trials, and a further 40% of the trial budget is kept aside for patient recruitment. Still, pharmaceutical companies fail to recruit patients for clinical trials. 

Additionally, most trials that finally take off fail to produce meaningful results because of a lack of meaningful participants. 

A pharmaceutical company trial website is the first place patients, seeking to recruit themselves as clinical trial participants, visit. Hence a well-designed patient-centric website plays a pivotal role in ensuring the success of a clinical trial website. 

But the barriers currently faced by the patients make the task challenging. Enrolling a professional web design company in NY can make the clinical trial enrollment process accessible by designing a website that is simple and easy to understand, access, and navigate. They will also employ convenience-enhancing technologies and solutions capable of overcoming these barriers, especially among the under-represented populations.

Tips a web design company should adopt to enhance a clinical trial web design

It is an established fact that a web design company plays an important role in the success of a clinical trial website design. But to achieve success in this, they must adopt certain best practices that will help eliminate those roadblocks that reduce the efficiency of the clinical trials. 

Understanding the user to create a User-Centric Design

A clinical trial website is a platform meant specifically for end users like trial participants, research coordinators, investigators, etc. Hence, its design should reflect the same. Along with researching extensively, web designers should conduct interviews with healthcare professionals and patients to understand the needs, preferences, and pain points of key stakeholders. 

For example, patient interviews can provide relevant information regarding their expectations, and current barriers to enrolling for clinical client trials. Healthcare professionals help refer patients for the trial. Hence, their motivating factor also plays a critical role. Consequently, the insights gathered from these will help web designers create clear, compelling content that appeals to all stakeholders. Integrating these during the web designing process will make the website user-centric and enhance user satisfaction and engagement. 

Clear and Intuitive Navigation

Capitalize on the power of a clean and clutter-free design to enhance its credibility and make it look professional. Implement an intuitive navigation system using a logical structure, prominent menu tabs with crisp, simple yet descriptive labels, and breadcrumb trails for an enhanced browsing experience. 

Leveraging journey mapping can help aid web design companies in New York in this process. This will help them visualize the steps a user is likely to take while interacting with the clinical trial website. Insights gathered from this can be integrated into the website design to make user navigation seamless and efficient. 

Information Architecture and UI/UX

These deserve special mention because they are essential components of a clinical trial website. The UI/UX results in a flawless overall user experience, while the information architecture organizes all website information in a simple and understandable manner. To ensure a good information architecture and enhance user experience, a web design company should:

• Organize website content logically and intuitively so that it aids the user’s journey

• Optimize page load times 

• Implement usability testing and gather feedback to identify areas of improvement

Mobile Responsiveness

Statistics show that more people access clinical trial websites using mobiles, tablets, and other such devices than from their desktops. To reach a wider audience, a web design company should ensure its web design is intuitive and responsive across devices, screen sizes, and platforms. Integrating this will enable users to access the website seamlessly, irrespective of their devices. 

Data security

All clinical trials generate sensitive and confidential data making it essential to prioritize cyber security. Thus, a web design company should integrate robust security measures like data encryption, secure user authentication etc., and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements like HIPAA. The effectiveness of these measures needs to be frequently monitored with the help of regular security audits. 

Accessibility and inclusivity

A clinical trial website needs to be inclusive so that even differently-abled people or those with language barriers can easily understand and access the website's contents. Offering multilingual support, using text alternatives for images, and providing closed captioning for videos are some ways to achieve this. An accessible and inclusive website design will help pharmaceutical companies reach a wider global audience. Hence this is another essential practice that website design companies should implement.

Post-launch support

It is crucial for a clinical trial website to work efficiently during an ongoing trial. Thus, a web design company in NY should mandatorily offer website maintenance post the launch of the clinical trial website. Maintaining a dedicated team for this will help them regularly monitor, iterate, optimize, and update the website. This will keep it efficient and effective. 

Finally…

A clinical trial website plays a critical role in the success of a pharmaceutical company's clinical trial. Hence, designing this website needs professional guidance and help. Opting for a web design company in New York well-versed with relevant practices to adopt for enhancing website efficiency is a smart solution. Ensuring that the chosen web designer prioritizes the above-mentioned best practices will help improve the efficiency of the clinical trial website. This will also increase the chances of successfully generating the data required to drive medical research forward and achieve groundbreaking advancements in patient care and treatment.