Taking Charge of Your Wellbeing

“The Taking Charge of Your Wellbeing website has been a go-to resource for millions of people throughout the years,” says Dr. Mary Jo Kreitzer, director of the University of Minnesota’s Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing. The health information website has recently relaunched at the end of 2023 with new features and improved navigation. “When it was launched almost two decades ago, it was a bold idea to suggest that people need to take an active role - to take charge - in managing and making decisions that impact their health and wellbeing.”

Center leadership identified the opportunity to reinvest in the website at the beginning of 2023. “We wanted to make the user experience smoother, faster, and update a lot of the articles and design,” says Kit Breshears, communications director at the Bakken Center. “Taking Charge was performing very well, but we knew it could do even better.”

“As a team, we’re always learning and growing. The way we analyze sites is much more data-informed than it was a decade ago,” explains Erika Stenrick, creative director and cofounder of Us Creative Works. “This time around, we learned a lot from heat tracking (visualizing where users click) and content inventory analysis (an in-depth spreadsheet where we gather notes & data on pages).” Us Creative Works has been an instrumental partner for Taking Charge since the website’s inception. “Throughout the site, we found that some of the deeper content was most-regularly accessed. We wanted a navigation that brought those pages to the forefront, which fueled the main themes in the navigation, especially the new Wellbeing topics area.”

Keeping up with Take Charge in 2024

The Center has welcomed new Research Assistant, Mobby Agboola, who is pursuing her PhD in Nursing Informatics at the University of Minnesota. Mobby is writing new content for Taking Charge about Arts and Wellbeing, Nature and Wellbeing, Food and Wellbeing, and completely redoing Navigating the Healthcare System, as well as new content about barriers to wellbeing faced by people in marginalized populations. 

“It has been fun to hear throughout the years how the public and healthcare providers use the site,” says Kreitzer. “With the Fall launch of a new online series of classes for persons living with cancer, lots of new information will be added to the site that is covered in the series. This new content will focus on how to partner with your health care team and resources for caregivers.”

Visit takingcharge.csh.umn.edu and take charge of your wellbeing today.