University of Louisville Health

UofL Health is a large academic health system with nine hospitals, 250+ physician locations, and over a hundred specialties. The website reflected all of that complexity, but it was organized around internal structure rather than patient needs. If you were looking for a specific kind of care, you had to know which department handled it, which location offered it, and where in the navigation to start. For someone under stress trying to find help fast, none of that works.

I started with the question every page needed to answer: what is this person trying to do right now, and how fast can we get them there? I built personas around decision behavior. A first-time patient comparing options. A caregiver managing someone else’s care. A person in an urgent situation who needs a provider and a phone number in seconds. Those personas drove the IA, the navigation model, and the page-level patterns. I restructured the site around patient tasks and life-stage intent instead of org-chart departments, and built hub pages that pull together everything related to a care journey in one place. The project also extended into an app design for the provider finder.

The design system was built for a team that needed to launch new service pages, provider profiles, and location content regularly without custom design work each time. Responsive behavior and accessibility weren’t afterthoughts. They were baseline requirements that shaped every template from the start, which matters when your users include older adults, people with disabilities, and caregivers on their phones in a waiting room.