American Cancer Society Launches Major Redesign

A medical website is only as good, and helpful as the clarity of the information presented there and the navigability of the site. In acknowledgment of this, the American Cancer Society recently redesigned its site in order to serve its site visitors more effectively. When you’re searching for information about cancer for yourself or family members, you need to find what you’re looking for easily and efficiently.

The Society sought to better serve patients, medical professionals, caregivers and others who are searching for cancer resources. The ACS’s site didn’t only get a facelift; it also was moved onto another platform: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to achieve this goal—more than 10,000 webpages were also moved over from the legacy content management system of ACS to AEM. The site is one of the most highly trafficked sites for cancer information, so it was crucial that the UX and mobile friendliness were improved for faster searching success.

While UX and navigability across all devices were primary redesign goals, so was making the site bilingual, specifically to serve the Hispanic audience. The solution? The redesign also resulted in the creation of a Spanish-equivalent site that’s fully functional.

The redesign was quite a challenge because it involved a slew of different objectives.

Finding information on particular forms of cancer is a high priority for many visitors, so the redesign focused on creating better navigation paths that empowered them to discover the information they wanted more easily, including launching the new Cancer A-Z Glossary.

News on cancer is a big part of patient and doctor education. The redesign made sure to establish a lively news center where the content is tagged by cancer type and other, vital particulars. This allows visitors to efficiently filter the news via one-touch access.

Along with the above, 12 unique templates were created to provide ACS site managers with the flexibility the required to create custom pages. At the same time, they were able to stick to ACS design and brand guidelines for a consistent look and feel across the redesigned site.

The end result is a faster site with better information architecture. Part of that is attributable to the clean, minimalistic design approach, too. The homepage features a lot of white space, which helps visitors focus on important site elements like:

• The navigation bar
• The headline (mission statement)
• The Donate CTA
• Contact info
• The hero image

Scroll down below the fold, and you’ll also see a card-based design that easily chunks content into different information groupings and sections for a seamless transition.

The site’s color palette is also accordingly minimalistic, with red, blue and white being the main colors repeated throughout the design.

Overall, the ACS’ redesign is a study in how good design makes life easier for visitors by improving usability. For a medical resource site like the ACS, there’s no more important task to be accomplished by the designers, as millions of people around the world depend on its high-quality information to help them make educated decisions about their health.

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