Designing for the Patient Behind the Persona: How Emotional Needs Should Shape Your Website

Every care journey begins long before the appointment. 

A small concern turns into a search, and that search carries a quiet emotional load. People want clarity. They want reassurance. They want to feel understood at a moment when they’re already carrying uncertainty. 

Yet those emotional needs rarely shape the structure of the hospital websites they rely on.

Healthcare marketers know the importance of guiding users from search to conversion. What is less visible is the emotional arc that influences each decision along the way—a journey that carries as much weight as navigation patterns or service line content, even if analytics can’t show it

This article explores how to recognize and support that emotional journey, starting with a closer look at the needs patients bring with them.

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Seeing the Patient Behind the Persona

Healthcare marketers often use personas to understand who they are designing for. Personas provide helpful context, yet they rarely capture the real forces shaping decisions during a care journey. In our conversation, Steve Koch, a founder of Cast and Hue and a long-time practitioner of human- centered design in healthcare, described a more practical way to understand what people bring with them when they arrive on a hospital website. 

Steve groups patient needs into three categories:

Functional needs:
These are tasks people must complete

• checking service availability
• confirming insurance acceptance
• booking appointment

Emotional needs:
These are the feelings people hope to experience

• Confidence about their choice
• Reassurance
• Relief
• Feeling understood

Social needs:
Those are expectations or pressures from others who influence the decision

• How I will explain my choice of treatment to my family
• How my caregiver will perceive my medical preferences

These needs do not replace personas, but they reveal what personas often miss. Two people with similar demographics can arrive with very different emotional contexts, which shape how they interpret information and decide whether to continue. Anyone who has accompanied a family member to an appointment has seen this firsthand. The same message can land differently depending on what someone is worried about that day.

“Our behavior is driven by emotion, and our brains make decisions based on those emotions long before the rational side catches up.” 
— Steve Koch

Understanding these layers prepares us to design for moments when emotion guides the next step. And that shift becomes especially clear when you look at the part of the website where people often hesitate the longest: the provider profile page.

Where Emotions Shape Decisions Most: The Provider Page

The moment the patient visits the profile page is when they decide whether they feel ready to move forward. It may appear to be a simple directory entry, but it is emotionally significant for someone who is already navigating uncertainty.

Steve pointed out a pattern he sees across projects. People trust that clinical care will meet a standard. They worry more about the relationship.

“Patients want to understand how a doctor will care for them and what kind of relationship they can expect.” 
— Steve Koch

This means the provider page has a dual role:

Functional signals:

• Credentials
• Locations
• Appointment availability

Emotional signals:

• Care philosophy
• Communication style
• A short introductory video or written message
• Evidence that the provider understands the patient’s situation

When emotional signals are missing, the page feels incomplete. Patients may hesitate because they cannot imagine what the interaction will be like. When emotional signals are present, confidence tends to rise quickly. A single sentence about care philosophy can do more for reassurance than a long list of publications.

The journey continues after booking

The emotional arc does not end with the appointment request. Patients still carry questions about preparation and logistics. Practical information becomes its own form of reassurance.

Helpful elements include:

• Clear instructions for how to prepare
• Parking and wayfinding information
• Expectations for the first visit

These additions support both functional and emotional needs. They also reduce stress during a moment when someone may already feel vulnerable. People often describe this phase as the point where they “just want to know what to expect.” Fulfill these needs by proactively providing quick links to the information, instead of leaving patients to search for this additional peace of mind on their own. 

How to Uncover These Needs: Start by Listening

Understanding emotional and social needs requires something most teams do not do early enough. It requires listening to patients before design decisions are made. Steve emphasized how accessible this can be. Insight does not demand a large research program or a long discovery phase. It begins with a small number of real conversations.

“If we talk to eight people having a similar experience, we uncover about eighty percent of the key insights we need.” — Steve Koch

Why these conversations matter

Analytics reveal behavior, but they cannot explain the emotions behind it. Brief interviews help marketers understand:

• Where patients feel uncertainty
• What helps them feel in control
• Which moments feel rushed, confusing, or reassuring
• How previous healthcare experiences shape expectations for the next visit

These insights reveal needs that guide content, UX decisions, and prioritization. They also ground your decisions in something tangible rather than assumptions about user intent.

How to gather meaningful insight without a large research effort

Healthcare marketers can begin with simple steps.

Practical starting points:

• Visit a waiting room and speak with patients about their recent experience
• Ask open-ended questions about decision points and moments of hesitation
• Look for recurring struggle points that appear across multiple interviews
• Capture emotional themes as carefully as functional ones

Even short discussions uncover details that personas cannot surface. Most teams are surprised by how much they learn in the first ten minutes.

How patient insights guide website priorities

Once the patterns become clear, they translate directly into digital decisions.

Examples include:

• Creating more reassuring content for common points of confusion
• Adding preparation instructions where patients often feel lost
• Refining key templates to reflect emotional signals
• Supporting wayfinding and onboarding to reduce anxiety before a visit
   

This becomes the entry point to continuous improvement and leads to a site shaped by real patient experience rather than internal assumptions. 

Designing Websites That Support Real Patient Decisions

When people arrive on a hospital website, they bring uncertainty and a set of expectations shaped by past experiences. They search for information, yet they also look for signs that they will be understood and cared for. That combination is what drives their next step.

By listening early, identifying where patients feel uncertain, and designing for moments that build confidence, healthcare marketers can strengthen the connection long before the first appointment.