Senior living website design: tour requests

A family member searching for senior living does not start with assisted living or skilled nursing. They start with a parent who needs help getting in the shower, or who keeps forgetting the stove. Many community websites sort their care into named levels, each with a clinical label, and the difference between them lives in a paragraph the visitor has to read on a phone. The visitor cannot tell which level fits their parent, and may not know the level names exist. Next comes the tour form, which asks for a diagnosis and a list of medications before it offers any date, so the visitor stops.

• Does the care page describe each level in daily tasks, such as bathing or meals, before the label?
• Can a visitor see a tour date or a weekday window before the form asks for health details?
• Is the cost described in words, with what it includes, rather than a line saying to ask?
• Is the text large enough to read on a phone without zooming, with buttons a thumb can reach?

Senior living sites have a vocabulary of their own, and a family outside the industry has to translate it. A care level may be named for the setting, the staff training or the type of support, and the names do not always tell a reader how much help a resident gets. A father who needs help with bathing and dressing every morning may fit a different level than one who only needs meals and reminders, and the page does not always say so. Read the care section as an adult child holding a list of daily tasks written on the back of an envelope. Check whether each level answers the question of which tasks it covers.

Rewrite each level as a short list of the daily tasks it includes, then add the label in brackets for the staff who use it. A visitor who sees 'Help with bathing, dressing and medication reminders' can match it to their parent in seconds. Keep the medical terms, because a discharge planner will expect them, but let the plain description come first.

A tour is the next step a family can take, and the form for it should be easy to finish on a phone in a parking lot. Many forms ask for a diagnosis, a list of medications, a mobility score and insurance details before they offer a visit date. Those fields belong to an assessment, and an assessment is a reasonable conversation for the community to have. It is an unreasonable first question on a website. A visitor who cannot give those details yet has no way to request a tour, so they request one from the next community on the list.

Ask for the family member's name, a way to reach them and the day they would like to visit. Let the visit happen first, then send a short health form by email for the staff to review before any move-in. A simulated visitor reaches the form and reports which field it could not answer, so you can see the stop without any real family's details being entered.

Families compare communities by monthly cost early. Some communities bill in two parts, a base rent for the apartment and a care fee that depends on the care level, and a page that names only the base rent makes the total impossible to estimate. The visitor cannot tell whether a community is within reach, so they cannot tell whether a tour is worth the time. Explain both parts in words, with what each one covers, then look at how the cost section reads after a visitor has already read the care levels.

Pricing page testing

Communities add care levels, rename units and rewrite tour forms each year, and one change can push the tour button below the fold or bring a health question back to the first screen. Run the same family visitor through the care pages and the form after every change, and check the phone view. A page behind a resident portal or login needs a test account you give the run, so it reaches the tour form.