Healthcare is rarely a one-off event, but Thomson Medical’s expertise lies in the joyful moments of life.
The new Thomson Medical website offers the warmth of Thomson’s care team and the joys of parenthood, while guiding couples at each stage through the lifelong journey of being parents. Their myriad service offerings—ranging from women’s health and children’s health services to their lesser known traditional Chinese medicine and dermatology services—are now consolidated into a unified browsing experience under one umbrella site, organised by user journeys and presented under a cohesive visual style.
I worked mainly on the creative direction of the content, producing illustrations and leveraging AI-assisted processes to speed up our time-to-launch.
Client
Thomson Medical
Project scope
UX Redesign of Website, Creative Direction & Content Population
Skilful UX design of a website is merely half the battle won—filling it with suitable content to carry the brand's message is the next step. The concept of the website's interface was built around a minimalist modern aesthetic, using the Figtree typeface, chosen for its rounded geometric properties, light soothing colours derived from the brand, and a rounded pill-shaped design element we named the Swaddle.
While the design elements conveyed modern elegance, the content was where we brought to life the compassion of the Thomson Touch.
Pregnancy and parenthood can be a stressful time, and we sought visuals that are comforting, inspire hope, and occasionally evoke a little childlike playfulness. To effectively convey the theme of warmth, I set guidelines for selection of imagery to be used. Images were grouped into:
We ensured a mix across these categories to avoid repeating similar images on a page, choosing images with soft, diffused lighting, and avoiding imagery that were overly clinical. For specialised services like genetic tests or pregnancy scans however, we used scientific lab-related images to retain professionalism, but carefully juxtaposed them with emotional images to balance it with some warmth.
By curating these candid images of parents and their children at appropriate emotional moments in the site, we communicated Thomson's mission to celebrate life with their patients and families.
To balance out the photo images, I also co-created a custom set of spot illustrations to highlight and represent Thomson's key offerings.
These illustrations adopted a naturalistic colour palette, themed purple according to the brand colours. Utilising a mild gradient and clean lines in the construction, the illustrations conveyed an overall effect of lightness and simplicity.
Being short on time and in an attempt to rapidly churn web pages written in a consistent tone and structure that could fit the new design templates, we turned to ChatGPT for help. This helped us to quickly transfer content into a critical mass of pages to build up an overall website mockup to kickstart the content review process, to be further refined for quality, SEO and conversion.
I created the base training prompts that each writer had to feed ChatGPT to set up the AI’s understanding. The prompts contained the platform, our purpose, the target audience, and what the writing had to achieve. They also included tone guidelines and do’s and don’ts to further enhance its training. With this in place, we could feed disparate content chunks and ask ChatGPT to rewrite an entire page of content into a consistent tone, reformatting the category blocks along the way into succinct points that flowed.
Leveraging generative AI technology, we managed to create 75 pages of base content within 3 weeks for the initial Go Live as a team of 3 writers, referencing existing content spread across Thomson sites.
Additional learnings about ✧AI:
While the AI-produced work was not at the quality needed for our final output, it reduced the initial burden of reformatting content into the structure we needed, especially if there were multiple chunks of repeated information to process. We could also ask it to explain complex medical terms that were not in the original content, saving us time in researching for definitions. These meant that the writers spent less time making the first draft, instead focusing on refining the quality of the content for the final output.
*Disclaimer: AI was not used to create new medical content or specify how Thomson conducts their medical procedures. If in doubt, check with your healthcare provider.
Inspiring innovation with Design Thinking for IMDA and its partners
