Ark
Our Future Health – Website supporting a groundbreaking medical research initiative
2023 – ongoing
Our Future Health is the UK’s largest ever health research programme that aims to recruit five million volunteers to help develop new ways to prevent, detect and treat diseases.
Working closely with the team at Our Future Health, we designed and built a new website that showcased their distinctive new brand while staying faithful to their version of the well-established and user-focused NHS design system.
An updated online presence
We were approached by Our Future Health to help redesign their public facing website, which is the main destination for potential participants to their programme.
In the early days of the programme they had created a simple website but had now reached the point where they needed something that was more flexible, extensible and a better reflection of their new brand.
Integrating the NHS design framework
As a health sector organisation working in partnership with the NHS, Our Future Health had made the decision to adopt and adapt the NHS design framework across all of their websites (including separate participant and health professional platforms). This enabled them to use fully user-tested interface components, ensuring that their content could be presented in an accessible way and that ‘transactional’ journeys such as signing up to the programme or booking appointments would be simple and familiar.
The main design challenge for the project was to apply Our Future Health’s bold and distinctive identity to the website, while staying true to their adapted version of the NHS design framework. We identified key areas of the site where the brand could be more fully expressed, including the home page hero, page intros and promo blocks. Elsewhere (e.g. header, footer and navigation) the design follows more functional design patterns that are used across other platforms. This allowed us to make a visual impact for people new to the organisation while retaining a consistent experience as users began participating in the programme on other platforms.
Working with internal experts
We worked closely with the Our Future Health Behavioural Science team to test key aspects of the site structure, including using tree tests to identify the optimal way to organise sections and name pages.
This expert support enabled us to settle on an approach that we were confident would be intuitive for the majority of site users.
I can’t recommend Bureau highly enough as they are very easy to work with and very good at what they do. We worked with Simon to develop and test our new information architecture, Darren to inject more personality into our existing design system and Adrian to take on and extend our design system into an efficient build process.