The Assignment
When tasked with analyzing two sites for their instant feeling, everyday usability, and lasting impressions, I chose Heart.org and WebMD.com. While both sites provide health information, their different goals shape their methods and the unique challenges they face: Heart.org focuses on credibility and impact, while WebMD emphasizes repeat visitors and clicks. And I was excited to see how they compared.
My expectations of each, based on my own mental model (basically what I had already decided my experience would be), were the opposite of my actual experience. I anticipated an onslaught of ads and messy design from WebMD.com and the opposite from Heart.org. While Heart.org met my overall expectations, the bright red that takes up the entire visible page was initially alarming. Red’s strong first impression has to do with color psychology: red can feel aggressive and can represent both positive and negative emotions.
Three Levels of Processing
For each site, I used Don Norman’s three levels of processing to evaluate, which are basically industry terms for how we experience things viscerally, behaviorally, and reflectively. Visceral: the first impression of the appearance, before conscious thought kicks in; behavioral: the pleasure and effectiveness of actually using and experiencing the site — is it intuitive; and reflective: did the site leave a lasting impression, and the likelihood of passing it on.
Heart.org
Visceral
When first arriving at the site, I was met with an intensely vibrating red color, which felt alarming at first. While I understand the correlation between color and content, hearts are pretty universally red, and that matches most anyone’s mental model of heart health, but other choices could have softened it. However, I can be my own devil’s advocate and can also see how the initial impact of red supports the gravity of the content.
After I acclimated to the red, everything reads clean and organized, with the color palette limited to red, white, and black. The overall clean visual design evokes knowledge and professionalism. Branding shapes perception. As Rory Sutherland’s painkiller example suggests, Heart.org’s polished design may make it feel more credible and trustworthy.
The use of typographical hierarchy, using type to indicate where to look, feels intuitive; the color use is intentional, and they use consistent photography and container styles, which subconsciously make the visual appearance comfortable.
The starkness and simplicity make the site feel like a resource, and the red encourages a more emotional experience.
Behavioral
I didn’t have to think twice about where to click: the site leans on visual cues I already know from a hundred other websites. The search bar is recognizable and easy to find, and red consistently guides which buttons and elements are interactive. These signifiers, as Don Norman calls them, help users know what to do, with the red color showing what they can click and the familiar search bar making it easy to find.
The navigation has three options in the top-left corner and another set of links in the center. Although having so many choices might feel overwhelming at first, the layout becomes easier to understand once users get oriented. This overwhelm, however, has a name: Hick’s Law, which means that the more choices a person is presented with, the longer it takes to decide, which can impact how long a user is willing to poke around before leaving.
After that, users can browse through the sub-navigation or use the search bar to go directly to the information they need. Scanning visible results is easier than coming up with the right search term from memory because the site does the remembering for you. The search tool provides immediate feedback with a clean list of results, while the use of red helps them recognize where to click. That instant response is feedback doing its job. No awkward pause, no wondering if I actually clicked the right thing.
Reflective
By the time I’d clicked around for a few minutes, I trusted this site the way I’d trust a cardiologist over a stranger’s opinion. This matches the user’s mental model; the site is reinforcing the expectation most visitors already carry about what a credible health authority should look and feel like. Because the content is comprehensive, users are likely to return when they need reliable information or want to explore a specific heart health-related topic.
Over time, the site leaves a neutral-to-positive impression. Its clinical, reference-oriented presentation emphasizes credibility and usefulness more than emotional engagement. However, for someone who’s lost a parent to heart disease, this probably isn’t just a reference site; it’s personal. This gives the site a rich duality of use cases.
WebMD
Visceral
As I mentioned before, to my surprise, WebMD creates a relaxed, organized first impression. The dark blue navigation bar with white text gives the page a clear visual anchor, while the featured story and three smaller stories create an easy-to-follow hierarchy, meaning it’s easy for my eyes to know where to go. The page feels cohesive without being overly polished or distracting, and only two matching ads appear during scrolling, which keeps the content from feeling interrupted. The sections are pleasant to scan because related photographs and illustrations are grouped, reflecting the Gestalt principle of proximity, meaning you’re more likely to perceive items grouped as related, which creates a more pleasant visual experience.
Still, one visual choice slightly weakens the site’s initial impression of trust. The glamour shot of actress Rebecca Romijn featured in the main story feels more like a BuzzFeed article than a health resource. A photo showing yoga, healthy cooking, or another clearly health-related activity might communicate the site’s credibility more immediately. In his TEDx talk, Rory Sutherland introduces the idea of “leaky” perception; even a single mismatched element can subtly affect how users interpret an otherwise thoughtful and well-organized page.
Behavioral
WebMD is very easy to scan. The page does not create confusion or overwhelm users with distracting elements, despite the ads, which can be visually distracting, so it is relatively simple to find a starting point and move through the content.
The search feature, however, is less obvious than the one on Heart.org because it is represented only by a simple magnifying-glass icon. On Heart.org, the search bar expands when users hover over it, offering an immediate visual cue that it is interactive. WebMD’s search tool is positioned in the top-right corner and requires users to click the icon before the search field becomes visible. This small difference changes what kind of mental effort the interaction takes; heart.org lets users recognize the search bar is there, while WebMD asks them to recall, meaning users have to remember on their own that clicking the icon will reveal one, with no visual cue prompting them first. Is that tiny difference asking too much of the user?
Once activated, though, WebMD’s search feature provides instant and organized feedback. This difference reflects Norman’s ideas about feedback and signifiers: the hover effect on heart.org communicates the search bar’s function earlier, while WebMD’s static icon leaves users to guess what it does before they click.
Reflective
WebMD offers a sense of leadership through its accessible and comprehensive health content. The site feels designed to answer a wide range of our everyday questions, and Google seems to prioritize it as the top result when anxiously searching for a symptom, which supports the impression that it is a dependable place to begin when users need health information.
The Symptom Checker is especially memorable for that same reason. Users can enter their age and sex and then interact with a body image to identify where they are experiencing symptoms. Using it follows what Don Norman calls the action cycle: you notice a problem, plan to use the Symptom Checker, tap the body map, review the results, and decide whether they answer your question. This makes the experience feel more engaging than simply searching through a list of conditions, and it gives users a practical, and maybe addicting, reason to return to the site.
Together, these features support WebMD’s long-term impression as a leading destination for health questions. Rather than relying only on a polished first impression, the site builds familiarity through tools and content that remain helpful after the initial visit.
The Final Take
What surprised me most, looking at both sites side by side, is that the website that really deviated from my mental model, WebMD, may be the one I would recommend for a quick, practical starting point. Heart.org communicates urgency, authority, and advocacy through its bold red visual identity, prominent search feature, and detailed clinical resources, while WebMD creates a calmer, more accessible experience through its streamlined layout, blue palette, and useful tools such as the Symptom Checker.
Although Heart.org initially feels more authoritative, WebMD’s ease of use and practical content make it more memorable and encourage users to return. Together, the sites show that visceral, behavioral, and reflective design choices shape not only how we interact with health information but also how we understand and remember it. I didn’t set out to pit them against each other, but the evaluations ultimately challenged my first impression: trust is not built through authority alone, but through the combination of credibility, clarity, and everyday usefulness through good UX design.
To dive deeper into the technical aspects of my critique, view the PDF of my full analysis below.
AI tools supported proofreading and editing for this post.