Finding Home Online
Reimagining Bethany’s online experience for future residents, donors, and employees.
Navigating senior’s housing and care can be an emotional and potentially confusing process. Bethany—one of Western Canada’s largest non-profit seniors housing and care providers—needed to better help potential residents and their families through this process.
For many families, the search for seniors housing and care begins online. Bethany needed a website that could support people at this life stage by making information easy to access and clearly conveying what life in a Bethany community is like. The site also needed to better serve other audiences, including prospective employees and donors to Bethany Care Foundation.
Understanding the Journey
We began our work by undertaking a discovery process that included a comparison with industry peers’ websites, an audience analysis, and a content audit. These helped us articulate our project goals and begin to make clear the direction to take.
Simplifying the Experience
That started with streamlining the user journey and refreshing content. We rebuilt the site around only four primary content buckets presented in the navigation, based on our user base and each offering predictable pathways.
Information is now delivered through a clean design and engaging, easy-to-understand mix of text, video, quizzes, and robust search, while dynamic feeds automatically surface contextual news. Clear, strategically placed CTAs guide users effortlessly toward next steps.
We incorporated a filtering system to offer an easier experience when exploring Bethany’s locations across Alberta. These filters present the different option categories that someone may be looking for—be it city, level of care, or specialized program offered.
Designing with Empathy
Current photography and short-form video now helps tell Bethany’s story in a way that is genuine and reflective of its communities. Throughout the site, Bethany’s key messages and caring language reinforces its values of community and care.
Accessibility informed our design decisions, from larger-than-average font sizes and colour contrast to iconography and navigation patterns, ensuring the site remains easy to use for older audiences. A soft interpretation of Bethany’s colours expressed through subtle pattern further reinforced the organization’s welcoming and caring approach.
Building for the Future
We simplified the site’s management by engineering an intuitive system that allows staff to easily update content and scale the site. As a back-end bonus, multiple legacy microsites sites were consolidated into this single login, reducing management overhead.
By balancing accurate, clear communication with empathetic design, Bethany now has a unified and distinct digital home that makes life change a little bit easier for its community.
View the site here.