Biotech website design: guide and examples

Chances are, you aren't a trailblazer in the area. The market will likely be filled with numerous competitors with a firm foothold in the domain. You should thoroughly research their websites to understand industry standards, pinpoint trends, and discover their best practices. This intelligence will not only let you see what you are up against but also manifest aspects not covered by rival services and enable you to identify the assets that will allow you to stand among competitors.

You should determine all categories of people you will work for — stakeholders and users. The first group includes researchers, investors, healthcare experts, patients, and regulatory bodies, whereas the second consists of potential customers who you should convert into leads and then into clients.

To meet the needs and expectations of both communities and their different segments, you should dig deep into their interests, preferences, and pain points. Besides, by holding interviews and conducting surveys, you will learn UX page design functional requirements and technical constraints, which is vital for establishing a shared vision of the future design and devising a cohesive project strategy.

This is the main deliverable of this stage. User personas are fictional biotech site visitors whose demographics, characteristics, and goals reflect the needs and behaviors of real-life target audience representatives. Detailed user personas will guide design decisions since you will tailor your messages to the established personas' interests and concerns and provide unique value for them.

Biotech websites contain complex scientific and therapeutic concepts that are hard to explain to an average person. So don't explain, but display. Images, infographics, animations, and videos on the site's pages will perform this mission perfectly, riveting users' attention and engaging the audience to browse the site further and stay on it longer. Besides, these elements break up large text blocks into smaller and more digestible portions, which are easier to comprehend. Animations are especially good at highlighting and exemplifying various scientific processes and innovations without overwhelming users.

Seeing is believing, and when it comes to understanding the intricacies of living matter, nothing could be better than a professional explaining animation, for example, the ones Nanobot Medical makes for biotech businesses.

Since you are creating a business website, its design should be aesthetically clean and sleek, so you should be careful with the quantity of animations and catchy fonts. The best biotech website designs are no-frills ones, which help the site look professional and convey scientific credibility.

The simplicity rule also applies to the language you use on the site. Scientific vernacular should be left for labs and academic papers. Here, you should go to all lengths to be understood by your target audience, who may not be aware of scientific intricacies and elaborate details. It means avoiding technical jargon and using only the terms and acronyms non-specialists are familiar with.

It is important to remember that you are creating a commercial website, not a pop-sci resource. It should bring profit to the owners and impress the organization's name on the audience. So, whatever visual elements you include, make sure they incorporate, or at least are consistent with, principal branding elements (typography, color schemes, logos, etc.).

In the big leagues, where competitors are trailing by a small margin, the subtleties of positioning take on a special weight -- the subconscious aesthetic perception of a brand's presentation is added to the client's evaluation. Take a look at Lab Berkley's website. Isn't it the perfect business card for a memorable first impression?

Hunting around for many minutes to discover the needed information differs from what users expect from a high-end biotech site. Users must be able to move across all menus and site structures quickly and easily. Otherwise, they will abandon your site and try your competitors. To rule out such adverse developments, you should organize your site's content logically and rely on a clear visual hierarchy that lets site visitors find what they need in a split second.

Any self-respecting business cares about the comfort of the user journey, from learning about a brand to deciding in its favor. Only by understanding your user will you be able to organize the space of affordances according to their perception. Look at how Inventia caters to its audience in a pretty narrow niche.

Biotech websites are more likely to be visited by people with health problems than, say, hospitality or fintech resources. A fair share among them have locomotive, visual, auditory, and other disabilities that limit their interaction with digital products. It would help if you focused on eliminating such limits and making your site as inclusive as possible.

Good design is invisible – it's usable. So, your website, adapted for a reader with limited perception capacities, will do much more for real inclusiveness than a canvas of text about meeting the level AA criteria of the World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative. Fortress Biotech may be less creative than others, but it is flexible and adaptable for various audiences.

Of course, the primary mission of charts, search functions, quizzes, surveys, polls, data visualization tools, and other interactive elements is to captivate visitors' attention. Yet, they do more than just amuse people. Interactions enhance user engagement, increase the time they spend on the site, and improve conversion rates. Besides, such elements sink into users' minds, making the site more memorable and encouraging them to revisit it.

It is organic for us to lean towards decisions and conclusions we make without external factors. By giving the user a space for choice and play, such as the Bionics interactive anatomical hologram to demonstrate muscle groups, we emphasize their subjectivity, thereby positioning them as the main actors in brand communication.

In the 21st century, most people interact with websites via their mobile devices, so you should prioritize the mobile experience of your target audience. To make your biotech site mobile-friendly, optimize its content for small screen sizes and equip it with a touch user interface. Texts require special care since they should be arranged in short paragraphs, contain concise sentences, and utilize bulleted lists a lot.

Although a biotech website contains rather sophisticated information, you should present it in an easy-to-grasp and visually attractive manner to allow visitors to understand what they read and enjoy what they see.

This seeming simplicity of text perception hides countless pre-conscious perceptual mechanisms tracking details such as grayscale and serif typefaces. By properly packaging it with visual material, you create a grain of inner voice and pictures that pop up before the user's inner gaze – Enveda, for example.

The content arrangement becomes logical and transparent when it tells a cohesive story. Top-notch biotech website design examples make the storytelling technique the core of their site organization system, where narrative elements explain the brand's vision, mission, and impact.

As the most natural way for human beings to convey large amounts of information, storytelling will always maintain itself as a marketing approach. See how Encue, from the very first screen, from the very first lines, draws you into the beautiful world of the most precious organ we will never see.

To smoothly guide users' actions and encourage them to contact the company or download its products or marketing material, you should place CTAs correctly. These buttons should have conspicuous colors and eye-catching graphics to grab users' attention. If you opt for popup CTAs, ensure they aren't too aggressive or overwhelming for site visitors.

A multipronged, point-and-click approach to creating user touchpoints gives you a head start on mindless overload with one-size-fits-all appeals. It's worth exploring how Illumina tactfully offers different ways to reach out on different occasions, depending on the context.

As surveys show, 53% of users leave a site if it takes more than three seconds to load, and the longer they have to wait, the fewer of them stay on it.

Moreover, slow loading has an adverse impact on conversions and site visibility in search engine results. To forestall such negative outcomes, you should ensure fast loading time. The chief recipe for it includes efficient coding and leveraging content delivery networks (CDNs). Among other performance optimization life hacks are lessening image sizes, cutting down on web fonts, page compression, redirect and plugin minimization, and extensive use of caching.

As a part of the healthcare domain, biotech initiatives are subject to stringent data privacy regulations. To comply with GDPR, CCPA, and other legal frameworks, you should adopt a security-first approach in biotech website design and include a private policy and cookies statement in it.

While designing a biotech website, you should keep the future in mind. This means leaving the site open for updates, novel technology integration, and potential growth of the organization without compromising its UX.

Among the various checking routines a website is subjected to (functional, security, performance, compatibility, load, stress, accessibility, and more), usability testing matters most for its design. Usability checks are conducted by submitting the site for pilot exploitation by a representative user audience who are asked to accomplish some tasks and report on the problems they face while doing it. Then, designers gather and analyze their feedback to eliminate exposed issues and improve the original version of the product during the iterative design process.

In an iterative design, you view the digital product as a living project requiring constant tweaking and improvement. That is why, instead of resting on your oars after the official release, you should regularly track user satisfaction concerning the biotech site's work, monitor its KPIs, pinpoint underperforming aspects, identify reasons for subpar operation, and address them during maintenance sessions. Such an approach turns biotech web design into a continuous initiative, where post-launch iterations based on user feedback enable the expert team to constantly upgrade UI and UX.

To be doubly sure and guarantee the seamless functioning of the biotech site, we recommend submitting it to an out-and-out beta testing. This is the final testing stage before the site's actual release, during which real-world users work with it in the production environment. When properly performed, beta testing allows QA experts to detect bugs, pinpoint usability issues, and identify security gaps. When it proves the site's quality, it can go live.

As you see, a first-rate design that will elevate your biotech website to a new level is a no-nonsense job with many niceties to consider. To avoid accidents and obtain a high-performing product with an exquisite look and seamless UX, it is wise to entrust its design to a team of seasoned professionals. We at Dworkz can translate your requirements into a sleek solution that will impress website visitors with an ultimate user experience and elegant UI. Contact us to reinvent your biotech website design or get a brand-new one from scratch.