As the nation's principal agency for cancer research and training, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) is the leader of the National Cancer Program, and the largest funder of cancer research in the world. NCI manages a broad range of research, training, and information dissemination activities that reach across the entire country, meeting the needs of all demographics—rich and poor, urban and rural, and all racial/ethnic populations.
Our team is responsible for the content, design, and development of the enterprise website, Cancer.gov and its other web properties. As lead designer, I work closely with the stakeholders, content strategists, IA's, user researchers, and developers to continue delivering value to the customer and end users.
It had been more than 5 years since the last redesign of NCI's website, Cancer.gov. The team focused on improving the user experience of the website, which included content and aesthetic updates, as well as a migration to a new CMS. Analytics and user research in the form of interviews and usability testing demonstrated that a clearer content strategy needed to be developed. During this project, the architecture was completely overhauled and the site was given structure, something it hadn’t had before. Dynamic content and new templates were introduced to the CMS. Another result of the new content strategy was the decrease in the total number of pages of the site, from 24,000 to 7,000, allowing clearer pathways to content.
Another large undertaking during this project included the team's first responsive website for which I lead the design team on. Even the parent NIH site was not responsive at this time. Previously, Cancer.gov had a separate mobile site. Usability testing helped our team refine the visual and interaction design to better serve the client and public. This project required an understanding of the content management system and responsive design best practices in order for me to design and develop requirements for templates. The design team was still using Photoshop, so I pioneered our move to Sketch and Invision. I documented all page types and templates in Sketch and created style guide and design system for the design and development team. In conjunction with this project, a rebranding effort was underway. I was responsible for seeing that the brand was carried throughout the website as the site is an extension of the NCI brand. The redesign didn’t stop at the website, our team translated the new NCI brand across digital and print materials throughout the Institute. I produced style and brand guides to support ongoing content and graphics creation.
Additionally, the website underwent a migration to a new CMS. I migrated content, tested functionality, and defined requirements for new templates and multimedia content. I trained staff and clients on the new CMS system.
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