Industry
Non-Profit
Client
Michael J Fox Foundation
Role
Designer
Length
1 Year
Overview
The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research is the world’s largest non-profit funder of Parkinson’s research. It was founded in 2000 to accelerate the next generation of Parkinson’s disease treatments and, ultimately, find a cure. Over the course of almost two years, I contributed in several ways to the production of the Michael J. Fox website.
Challenge
The Foundation’s website had become outdated and bloated with custom code to meet each department’s requirements. Our task was to develop a custom, robust design system that would meet everyone’s needs. I helped to develop and implement this design system alongside a lead visual designer.
Strategy
Content First
We worked alongside the Foundation’s team as they provided us content in an agile sprint flow. The content informed the development of the design system and vice versa.
Atomic Design System
Developing this design system required a deep understanding of the content and how it would be presented to users. We used the atomic design methodology in the development of this system. Each component was isolated from page-level designs, pixel perfected, and designed responsively, to ensure a smooth handoff to developers.
Design Ownership
After initial concepting and production of some key pages by the lead designer, I was responsible for expanding the design vision by creating a design system, designing over 100 pages with real content, solving UX problems, and ensuring that all interaction patterns met the needs of our audience. I worked side by side with developers, created and managed tickets in Jira, wrote user stories, performed design reviews, and logged bugs. Every component that makes up the site today was reviewed and approved by me.
Drupal CMS UX Optimization
As the developers created the CMS and integrated each module, we worked together to optimize the admin user experience to ensure that content authors could easily maintain and add to the system we developed as a team.
Solution
Custom, Scalable Design System
