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Keeping It Simple, Even for Doctors

Interview with Kevin O’Malley

Kevin O’Malley came to Usability Week to look backward. As the creative manager of the small marketing communications department of the rapidly-growing TomoTherapy Inc., in Madison, Wisconsin, he was involved in re-designing and re-launching the firm’s Web site in February—and he wanted to see if they had done it right. And, of course, he assumes the need to revise the site will never end.

Compounding the demands of his work is the fact that TomoTherapy just went public in May; its latest financial report mentioned year-to-year growth of 86 percent, with revenue for the most recent quarter of $51.2 million. The firm credits its success to its Hi Art system, which uses image guidance to deliver radiation therapy with unprecedented accuracy. Whereas the company had about 300 employees a year ago, at last count the number was about 550, O’Malley noted.

“I have a copy-writing background, and our marketing communications department has just two people,” he explained. “I manage the Web site and manage its growth, working with outside vendors to build it. The goal is to promote the product—our product is a very large, expensive piece of equipment that is not suitable for e-commerce. So the site is not particularly interactive.

“The previous version of the site was built by a developer with no design sense, and while it was only a year old it looked like it was much older,” he explained, “It was a small site with dense text. But we knew we were growing and that we were going to be going public. So we wanted to present a more updated version of what we are, with content that was more creative, within a site that was also easier to maintain.

“It was a fair amount of work,” he recalled. “It took us about two months, with a lot of up-front work that I handled with the help of an outside designer.”

For the re-launch, he used a PHP-based content management system called Expression Engine from EllisLab Inc. “It is intended for smaller sites, and with us it proved to be pretty smooth—the design work is mostly in setting up the templates, since you just set them up and go on from there,” he recalled. “We chose the designer because he was also a developer, and we wanted the design to be deeply integrated with how the site worked.” He also manages a forum site for the firm, but no design challenges are involved there, he noted.

As for what he hoped to learn at the conference, “I have worked on a lot of websites in my life, and things are changing all the time in terms of what is considered strong design and content. I want to be able to look back on what we did and see if we can make improvements—because I know that we can improve.

“For instance, there is still some dense text on the site. We want to break up some of the pages, add more searching, and fine-tune the content. It has about 50 pages now, and we want to keep it that way.

“One of the things that I am specifically interested in,” he added, “is how to proceed when the thing you are talking about is complex, and you need to talk to two distinct audiences—in our case, patients and doctors—who want to know how it works. But obviously, a public Web site is the best way to do that.”

Looking forward, rather than back, O’Malley assumes that the TomoTherapy site will need constant revision. “What we need to say changes as we grow,” he noted. “While we have to educate the public about our product, it is hard to educate people in a concise manner when the story is pretty complex. Doctors like bullet points just as other people do, but they also want to be told exactly why our machine is better. And many radiation oncologists do not understand what the product does.”