Website Magic @ Key To Growth Therapy
Finding and building trust with new clients in redesigning a pediatric speech pathologist’s website.
Role: Product Designer | Timeline: 16 weeks | Tools: Wix, Figma
Background
Key To Growth Therapy (KTG) is a private pediatric speech therapist practice based in New York. The founder made the decision to go off on her own after working in private schools for years. She’s focused on growing her client base and building relationships with parents, and wants a website that feels more dynamic, trustworthy, and memorable than her current site.
Problems
KTG’s founder wants a website that’s more visually aligned with her brand’s values: progress, partnership, personalization, empowerment, celebration, and play.
Solutions
Define the aesthetic that will bring the practice to life by working closely with the stakeholder, conducting extensive market research, and using color psychology.
Redesign the website!
KTG also hired a website copywriter to refresh the language on the site.
TL;DR
Don’t have time to read this whole thing? Here are the main takeaways.
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This project tested my eye for detail. Wix isn’t the best at building responsive sites or maintaining size consistency across components, so I was regularly checking (and double-checking) element sizes and correcting as needed. Its lack of responsiveness also limited where we could place certain design elements, like the menu.
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Every detail matters, especially visuals and branding. One element that the stakeholder didn’t want on her site: any vector art of letter blocks, since letters and spelling go against her practice’s play-first ethos.
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I successfully designed a website that is both memorable to and expected by—trustworthy—new clients. (“Success” here is defined by stakeholder satisfaction)
Goals
User goals
To find a trustworthy speech therapist for their child. They want someone who fits into their life and alleviates their stress about their child’s development.
Business goals
To gain more clients through maintaining a transparent and reliable online identity.
Empathizing
Most of KTG’s clients are parents based in affluent areas of New York, specifically Lower Manhattan and North Brooklyn. These parents are looking for guidance, someone they can be confident will help their child. They want someone who’s speaking to them, meeting them where they are, and even answering questions they didn’t even know they had.
Pain points
The current website feels static and impersonal. Square shapes and sharp edges abound, lending a sense of stiffness to the design rather than the youthful energy KTG wants to embody.
How might we design a site that feels approachable, informative and in line with KTG’s values?
Brainstorming
Market research
Since we were targeting primarily North Brooklyn and Chelsea parents, I took a look at competitor therapists in those areas. Bright colors and photos of smiling children abounded—elements that I later channeled into KTG’s design—though otherwise I found their UX/UI to be lacking. I also audited the existing KTG website to find areas of improvement.
Designing
To highlight the practice’s focus on play, I incorporated soft, organic shapes and candy colors taken from the logo. Graphic patterns include a dotted line, which implies guidance, growth, and forward movement. It also serves as a useful visual tool in connecting elements like testimonials.
For the font, we went with Bricolage and Quicksand—both feel lighthearted and familiar but not distracting, giving the site equal parts personality and authority.
Iterating
Content alignment
Most of the design was completed before the copy was, so certain adjustments were made when that language came in. I added more pages, incorporated more cards, and included more graphic elements like vector art to enhance the site’s youthful energy. I also decided to give each page its own color, to make it easier for users to know where they were based off of the colors of the page.
I wanted to extend the colors to the navigation, so each page’s tab would be in its color. However, this wasn’t something Wix supported or allowed me to code.
Conclusion
This redesign successfully aligned the KTG’s brand with its website, cultivating a sense of play—through vector art, soft shapes and cheerful colors—and transparency, with an appropriate information hierarchy.
