About the project
IPF is a lung disease marked by the scarring of lung tissue, making it increasingly difficult to breathe and function, commonly affecting people between 70-75 years old. Unfortunately, the prognosis for IPF is generally poor, with an average survival time of around 3 to 5 years after diagnosis.
The objective of this project was to create a website, a brand identity, and develop accompanying resources to provide support for patients and caregivers affected by IPF. The primary focus was to address their mental well-being and symptom management needs, extending from the time of diagnosis to end-of-life care.
In 2018, I was part of the team of four including UX, UI, and Strategy, working collaboratively with both the engineering and digital strategy teams. I worked on the entire project from discovery to delivery.
Problem
People emotionally respond to a terminal diagnosis in different ways and they will continue to change their outlook as they move through the stages of their life.
The current website doesn’t acknowledge this variety of emotions and doesn’t help patients and carers through the process. The website also lacks a sensitive tone of voice and design language.
Many patients and carers say that there limited information for them about the disease and how to manage their condition, and healthcare professionals haven’t got a good source of information to direct patients towards.
Goals
The ambition for the Life with IPF is to encourage patients and carers, at every stage of their journey, to become proactive in their care - for them to understand and acknowledge their condition and use our resources to help them to live a more fulfilling life.
User interviews
Due to the sensitivity of the topic, our team was only allocated a small amount of time to talk to patients with the disease. Some of the key learnings from this exercise were:
Patients who attend a patient support group improve how supported they feel, but are hard to find
Some people refrain from telling their friends and family about their condition until they absolutely have to
Not everyone is comfortable reading information about the disease and opt not to learn how to manage their symptoms
Existing website
The existing experience is not very accessible, which is particularly important with the demographic we’re designing for. Additionally, the website is not responsive either, preventing people using it on the go.
The experience is also full of patronising videos and illustrations, not appropriate for this topic.
Landscape and lateral analysis
Analysing competitors and laterals allowed us to gain insights which informed a lot of our ideas while creating the user journeys.
Experience takeaways
Using the research as a guide, we held a workshop to define ‘experience take aways’ which helped us identify how we want people to feel when using our service.
Patient stages
Talking to patients and healthcare professionals, we also defined what the high level journey looks like for people who are affected by the disease.
Four emotionally-led patient and carer journeys
Writing personas and a narrative allowed us to understand how different types of people might be feeling at each stage. Based on their emotions, we were able to identify the tone of voice, depth of content, content format and if it meets the user goals. We also identified which type of healthcare professional would be present and which experience take aways would be prominent
This process also allowed us to identify some opportunities to bring into the ideation phase and by identifying which content would be reusable, we were able to have initial thoughts on some of the commonly used components we would need.
A paper design system
Using an initial site-map for reference, we spent time drawing out template designs. We iterated constantly, layering up sheets of paper with every version. We recognised common components that we were drawing, so used the old fashioned photo copier to print out multiple versions of them.
After a while, we had a catalogue of components and were able to consolidate them in an effort to reduce development effort later on.
Higher fidelity to massage the finer details
We briefly moved into wireframes as it gave us an opportunity to get some feedback from stakeholders, and allow the development team to begin their requirements gathering.
Visual identity and interaction design
Along side designing the experience, we also designed the visual identity for Life with IPF, which included typography, colour palette, illustration style and logo.
To make the content easily readable and digestible, we ensured there was plenty of generous white space and a good typographic hierarchy.
Key features
Some key features of the design include:
The ability to bookmark pages
Highlight and save snippets for later
A hub focused solely on carer support
Patient stories — A collection of stories from real people dealing with IPF, delivered in blogs and video format
Glossary of inline medical and non-medical terminology
Photography to represent life with IPF
Initially using stock imagery, we aimed to find photography that captured genuine moments that included family, friends and healthcare professionals.
We collated a set of images to propose a photography shoot. This was important as we wanted to create a genuine representation of life with IPF. We didn’t think we should ignore the reality of what a patient’s life entails, and we should normalise the use of oxygen tanks and represent the support networks of different patients.
PDF for download
Due to the age of this demographic, we knew that offline content was still valuable. Additionally, health care professionals wanted something to refer to during the patient journey.
Ebook
We knew that this content would be good to have when away from the computer. We decided that we’d deliver the content in an Ebook as the accessibility controls are far more advanced than a mobile browser.
