Redesigning a Healthcare Trials Resource

IMPAACT was working with a hand-maintained site, only accessible by two people on staff. Thus, content on the site was often formatted on an ad hoc basis, and older content was hard to update. Needless to say, the non-responsive site was time-consuming to edit. 

As a part of our discovery process, we revealed an opportunity to comb through IMPAACT’s database to reinforce and standardize connections while also making them sortable and searchable.

Getting the site onto a CMS solution immediately raised its accessibility for IMPAACT staff. The director of IMPAACT Community Advisory Boards, who was previously working on a “website within a website,” can now manage their section of the site with a lot less friction, including functionality to have a bilingual site in English and Spanish.

IMPAACT’s redesign effort came in conjunction with a brand refresh; we took the opportunity to extend their new logo and colors into a flexible design system.

Structurally, we re-positioned IMPAACT’s homepage as well. Before the homepage was simply a way to dig down into the rest of the site. The final result included custom-designed modules to elevate content from within site and tell a deeper story about IMPAACT’s mission and work.

IMPAACT conducts research across the globe, meaning many of its sites are in remote locations with subpar broadband or mobile network access. We had to ensure that the site we built could perform efficiently in adverse scenarios. IMPAACT studies, a cornerstone of the site, contain a lot of information and loading it all at one time is suboptimal. We constructed the studies as a set of tabs where, after the first overview tab, each one acts as a set of search results. The data within isn’t queried until the tab is clicked, meaning users with limited bandwidth aren’t wasting it on the content they don’t mean to access.

In the end, IMPAACT received a website recognized as one of the best nonprofit websites by design rush and one that supported its users better both externally and internally.