Digital strategy that serves your customers and your institution
Digital strategy, UX design, and user research for organizations of every size.
I'm Ben Oderwald, a digital strategist, UX designer, and researcher. Twenty-plus years in digital: five directing UX strategy at one of the country's leading healthcare digital agencies, and the rest at senior levels luxury, financial services, direct-to-consumer, and B2B. If you’ve got a complex problem, a strategic question, or a persistent frustration with your current digital experience, I can help.
Services
Most engagements start here: defining the problem, assessing current state, identifying the work with the highest leverage, and mapping a path from where you are to where you need to be. From there the engagement expands into research, design, and content. Four services below. Most engagements use more than one.
Digital strategy
Where your digital experience is now, where it needs to go, and the prioritized path between the two. Audits of existing digital properties, competitive and reference benchmarking, stakeholder alignment, KPI definition, help with AI and other emerging technology, and a roadmap that maps to budget and to your calendar. The deliverable is something your leadership and your delivery teams can both work from.
UX design
The structure, flow, and interaction patterns that move patients through your digital experience the way they need to. Information architecture, navigation, interface design, prototyping, and design systems. I work in the same tools your team works in (Figma primarily) and I deliver work your developers can build from. Where your team is already running Epic MyChart, an Adobe Experience Manager build, or a custom front end, the design integrates with those constraints rather than fighting them.
User research
Direct work with end users to surface what analytics can't tell you. Why people behave the way they do on your digital properties, what they're looking for and not finding, where the experience stops working. Methods include patient interviews, usability studies, focus groups, journey mapping, and more. After hundreds of hours of this work across health systems, the patterns are consistent across populations, and they shape every design decision I make.
Content strategy
What gets said, who says it, where it lives, and how it stays accurate over time. Patient-facing content (clinical service pages, condition information, provider profiles, navigation copy, microcopy on the high-friction screens) and editorial governance (who in your organization owns what, how decisions get made, how content stays current as services and providers change). The goal is content that does the work you need it to do, written for patients making real decisions.
My Partners
The work I do often sets the stage for a larger project. When an engagement calls for a full team, additional design capacity, development, technical implementation, marketing, content production, analytics build-out, ongoing operations, I bring in trusted partners I've worked with for years.
Senior multidisciplinary teams, assembled around the engagement.
&Kind doesn't carry a fixed team. It matches senior practitioners to each engagement, drawing from a vetted network across strategy, design, research, development, analytics, marketing, and content. The depth of an established agency, the focus of a small team, and no bill for the people who aren't on your project. When I need to scale a team up quickly with people I trust, this is where I go first. The practitioners in the network are people I've worked with directly, not names from a roster.
Work that moves the needle.
A sample of results across healthcare digital transformation, enterprise UX strategy, and e-commerce platform design.
Scheduling and appointment conversion for health systems
Online self-scheduling, redesigned to meet patients at the moment of commitment, produced a 75% and a 418% increase in digital scheduling volume at two separate multi-hospital health systems. At a large academic medical center, appointment-page traffic grew 86% and scheduling click-throughs rose 23% within six months of launch.
Deeper site engagement
Site engagement (page views and time on site) rose 20% at one multi-state system. A not-for-profit regional system saw a 25% increase in mobile engagement, 13% more traffic to specialty detail pages, a 35% lift in user retention, and a 27% reduction in mobile page load time after a mobile-first rebuild. An academic medical center saw a 2.5x increase in virtual specialty care appointments in the first six months after a home page redesign.
Digital transformation for a retail giant
A major initiative at a sector leading sports apparel and equipment company to update end to end B2B sales processes, with a new suite of digital tools covering the entire seasonal sales and support process, resulted in $380 million in savings and increased sales in the first year.
Scale of delivery
The platform strategy behind this work is built to scale: 2000+ pages across 4 global regions for a leading law firm,16 branded mobile apps rolled out across a multi-state hospital network, and a library of 40 reusable components that lets a national pediatric health system update its entire site without separate development for each page.
Not sure where to start? That's fine.
You don't need a fully scoped brief to start a conversation. Bring the problem: a specific initiative, a strategic question, a persistent frustration with your current digital experience. I'll help you figure out the right next step. If it's a fit, I'll say so. If it isn't, you'll leave with a clearer picture of what you actually need.
No pitch decks. No agency dog-and-pony. Just a direct conversation about your situation.