Boston Children's Hospital
Boston Children’s Hospital, one of the nation’s leading pediatric care institutions, needed a bold new vision for their digital presence. I led a design team to reimagine their digital experience from the ground up.
Challenge
Boston Children Hospital’s website was outdated and fragmented, struggling with:
- Disjointed user experiences across patient, caregiver, and clinician portals.
- Complex navigation that made finding critical health resources difficult.
- Lack of internal alignment, with competing priorities from marketing, IT, and clinical teams.
As the design lead, I had to drive a strategic vision, gain stakeholder buy-in, and ensure a scalable, future-proof design system.
Approach
We had one job: design a bold new website direction. This makes it sound overly simple. With multiple departments, competing priorities, and a hospital full of clinicians, caregivers, and patients all needing different things, it was anything but.
Aligning the Chaos
First, we had to get everyone on the same page. Marketing wanted a slick, polished front-end. IT wanted security and stability. Clinicians needed something that wouldn’t slow them down. Patients and caregivers? They just wanted to find what they needed without digging through a maze of outdated pages.
We pulled together stakeholder workshops to cut through the noise and define what success actually looked like. Then we dove into research - evaluating how real people interacted with the site, mapping out pain points, and figuring out what actually mattered. The end goal? Delivering a direction that made sense for everyone, not just another tasteless and bloated redesign.
- Defined clear goals so we weren’t designing in circles.
- Mapped real user journeys to kill unnecessary friction.
- Baked in accessibility from the start, instead of treating it as an afterthought.
Design Leadership & Innovation
Once we had buy-in on the strategy, we focused on delivering design concepts that hit four key marks:
- Felt right for the brand – clean, modern, and unmistakably Boston Children’s Hospital.
- Pushed the envelope – forward-thinking, but not so far ahead that IT would reject it.
- Technically feasible – every design needed to be realistic, not just pretty.
- Scalable – elements had to be flexible and reusable across different pages and future expansions.
We delivered bold but feasible design concepts. We prioritized flexible, reusable components for future-proofing. We sold the vision internally, answered concerns, and ensured every decision was defensible.
Our vision was innovation focused, we:
- Developed forward-looking design concepts
- Introduced modern interaction patterns
- Created innovative navigation solutions for complex content
- Designed a scalable, future-proof design systems
Navigating Internal Buy-In & Iteration
Here’s the thing about big organizations: everyone has an opinion, and they all have great reasons why they’re right. There was pushback. Some teams didn’t want to change. We go buy-in by:
- Running workshops to get everyone aligned.
- Cutting through internal politics with usability data and standardized UX patterns.
- Balancing UX best practices with IT and compliance needs (without making compromises that hurt users).
Outcome
Our team delivered:
- Simplified navigation, making key resources easier to find.
- Scalable design, with flexible, reusable components.
- Full stakeholder buy-in, ensuring smooth adoption.
- Improved mobile and accessibility standards.
- Easier content management, reducing IT reliance.
The design vision was approved by stakeholders and later implemented by Boston Children’s Hospital’s development team, setting a new standard for pediatric healthcare digital experiences.
This project reinforced that design leadership isn’t just about pixels—it’s about people. By fostering alignment, innovation, and user-centric thinking, we transformed BCH’s website into a powerful, accessible tool for patients, caregivers, and clinicians alike.