Colorectal Cancer Canada

User Experience & Art Direction

Colorectal Cancer Canada (CCC) was a client project while working at Elite Digital. CCC came to us looking for a website redesign. The client’s goals were to focus on early cancer detection and prevention, target a younger demographic, and add personality to the website.

Process

Research
Research for this project consisted largely of online research about colorectal cancer. In this research, we learned the statistics, symptoms, and treatments. This information was good for context into the disease but we also needed to think about the emotional effects of cancer. Luckily, the client had very a detailed story series from people who had been/are affected by colorectal cancer. From reading many of these stories we were able to grasp some of the emotional effects, feelings, and fears those people were experiencing. We also reviewed the analytics on their current website, to help further understand how users currently navigated the website.

User Personas
The powerful stories we read helped shaped the user personas we created. As a team, we decided to position the user personas into 3 stages. Our first persona was someone without cancer and new to CCC. This persona would be our way to target the younger generation and for these users, we would focus on cancer prevention and awareness. Our second persona was someone who had just been diagnosed with cancer. This persona would need information about their diagnosis and support. The last persona we created was someone who had lost a loved one to cancer. The unfortunate reality of cancer was that not everyone survived and we wanted to make sure that their loved ones were represented. For this persona, we wanted an empathic tone, but also a way for this persona to have a call to action and raise awareness.

Sitemap & Wireframes
We proposed to the client that we actually create 3 options when entering the website, one for each of the user personas we had established. The thought process was that the information each persona would be looking for would be drastically different based on their relationship with cancer. For example, someone without cancer may not be interested in cancer support groups whereas someone with cancer might be.

Art Direction & Design
Upon the client's approval, I moved the UI design to another designer on the team. While I did not design the UI myself, I did work closely with the designer to establish the art direction and oversee the project. My vision for the project was to create a clean, modern, and easy to navigate site that had a strong personal connection. We choose to use calming blue colours that matched the existing brand and evoked reassurance and trust. I also wanted to make sure that website was visually interesting with imagery to break up a large amount of copy and that we included imagery at each persona would be able to relate to. I made sure that we followed best practices when considering accessibility. Colour contrast, text size, content layout, initiative navigation items, and buttons were all areas we made sure to be accessible.