Client — Atria Senior Living
Creating a Web Experience That Inspires Confidence and Builds Trust
The Challenge
Create a digital space that immerses visitors into a vibrant senior living community and entices new residents.
The Process
Interviews
Customer Journeys
Sitemaps
Wireframes
UI Design
Component Library
The Outcome
New national websites for Atria Senior Living, Holiday Senior Living and Atria Retirement Canada; and companion sites for each of their 370+ locations.
Setting the Stage
For many seniors, moving into a senior living community can signify a loss of independence and evoke sadness from leaving a beloved home behind. This dynamic informed our website redesign for Atria. We knew that to guide new residents through this important decision we needed to help seniors feel not only comfortable, but excited about their next chapter. To do this we wanted to show future residents what we heard from current residents: that the move to Atria made their lives richer by offering a new freedom to focus on interests, hobbies, and friendships.
Our Approach
Through resident interviews we learned about the strong relationships residents formed at Atria, and we heard about caring staff. Knowing this, we made resident and staff portraits the first thing a visitor saw on the Atria national site. By showing the faces of Atria front and center, it’s easy for site visitors to imagine their new neighbors and picture themselves in a warm and friendly community.
The audience for the site is not only seniors but also adult children who provide guidance to their parents. Information about the Atria's communities, amenities and costs are factors they weigh heavily. With that in mind, we designed a robust image gallery for each community to showcase photos of their spaces. 3-D floor plans, a scannable list of amenities and services, and clear pricing all make it easy to gather the information site visitors need.
We also wanted to help Atria communicate thought leadership around important topics such as health, financial planning, and family dynamics. We structured the site so visitors can quickly access articles from experts in those areas. In addition to educating readers, these articles help spark the sales cycle, a process that can take months, or even years given the nature of the transition to a senior living community.
Grounded in UX best practices, we wireframed each of the site's components and aligned them with user journeys created from user goals. We also performed usability tests to ensure type sizes were legible for seniors, and we followed accessibility standards such as color contrast ratios.
The Results
The result of our engagement was a modular design system that enabled the integration of multiple sites into one elegant and cohesive experience. With so many properties in the Atria portfolio, our modular system allows for flexibility within each property's website and maintains consistency across sites. The modular structure also allows Atria’s staff to provide continuous optimization through AB testing and to easily create dynamic, targeted content.
All in all, the final product is a digital space that educates and reassures families during an important transition, and one that serves as a robust tool to improve Atria’s marketing and sales efforts.
Our engagement with Atria included new designs for Holiday and Coterie Senior Living, two additional brands in the Atria portfolio. The sites for each brand have differing visual styles that appeal to their respective audiences, but they were all designed with user needs at the center of the process.