Compassion in Dying – New website co-designed with users to help people prepare for end of life

2021 – ongoing

WebsitesStrategy

Compassion in Dying is a charity that helps people prepare for the end of life, including how to talk about it, plan for it, and record their wishes.

To coincide with the launch of a new brand identity, Compassion in Dying partnered with us to develop a website that provides their audience with clear and accessible information supporting conversations and decisions about death and dying.

Focused on users

Compassion in Dying is an organisation that is unwaveringly focused on its users. As the leading provider of crucial information about death and dying, they have invested a huge amount of time and energy into understanding the information needs, motivations and typical behaviours of their audience. They’ve engaged them in extensive research including interviews, surveys and other ethnographic approaches and involved them in a process of co-design of key content on topics such as living wills, advance statements and lasting power of attorney.

This has extended into their approach to their new site, with users involved in the process of distilling the large amount of historical content into a more manageable group of key articles. Compassion in Dying were supported by independent content strategist, Lauren Pope who worked with them to identify an appropriate content structure. We took on this early work and developed the final information architecture which included a full specification of data structure and wireframes for all key pages.

Translating the new visual identity

An extensive design exploration process enabled us to work with Compassion in Dying to translate their vibrant new look and feel into a website design system that serves their current requirements and establishes patterns and principles for new components and layouts.

The design approach draws on and expands the client’s distinctive new illustrative style, and provides space for their library of warm and people-focused imagery.

Features to support long-form content

There are a number of features on the website to support the presentation of relatively long pages containing multiple complex concepts. This includes the adoption of a number of the core gov.uk component types, including care cards, callouts and step-by-step elements, and we developed an in-page navigation that allows users to orient themselves within a document and navigate quickly between sections. 

We also included an in-page feedback system that sends relevant data as events to Google Analytics and allows Compassion in Dying to understand the perceived usefulness of content, both at page level and across the site as a whole.