Patient Website Design
For Spark Therapeutics- TEAM: Toolhouse
- ROLE: Lead Designer
- YEAR: 2016
Spark Therapeutics specializes in one-time therapies designed to deliver potentially life-altering transformation for people and families affected by genetic disease. Inherited Retinal Diseases (IRDs) are a group of rare eye disorders caused by an inherited gene mutation, and can result in vision loss or blindness. I was lead designer on a team tasked by Spark with creating an informational website focused on explaining the basics of IRDs, how they affect those living with them and the treatments Spark is developing to mitigate them.
A Site For All Eyes
Since we were creating a website for a community that experiences vision impairment, it was critical to research and adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to ensure colors maintained a high enough contrast ratio and text size did not fall below the minimum size recommendations.
Using those details as guardrails, the design focused on incorporating real people living with IRDs and the researchers developing treatments for them. The site included extensive information covering the what, why and how of the diseases and their treatments written in a way that is easily accessible to all readers. Teaser CTAs were placed at the bottom of each page to guide the user through the entirety of the site.
A Community Effort
The IRD community is fairly small and tight-knit. With that in mind, we created an ongoing series of articles that shared the experiences, trials and triumphs of people living with IRDs. The series also highlighted new information related to IRDs and the research and development related to their treatments.
Ongoing Education
To encourage user engagement, we developed a quarterly newsletter as a companion to the site. The newsletter included updates on the latest developments within the IRD community and links to new content on the site. To drive newsletter subscription, contextually written sign up CTAs were strategically placed within the content of each page of the site.
