Memorial Sloan Kettering

Challenge

The audience is people who just heard the word cancer. They need clarity, not volume.

The content culture defaulted to density. That's backwards for this audience. People arrive scared, searching for answers, in the middle of the hardest thing that's ever happened to them. Every design decision had to start there. The job was a foundation the whole organization could build on, made for humans in their most difficult moments.

The Solution

Start with the person reading the page. Build everything to serve them.

Strategy came to us first on this one, handing off analytics on where trust was actually breaking down, which shaped our design approach from day one.

We spent the first stretch understanding what good looks like. We audited everything MSK had, then studied the best healthcare institutions and the best digital brands, because a patient doesn't lower their standards when they get sick. That gave us an honest baseline and a clear gap to close.

Then the team built the foundation. A responsive grid pressure-tested across every screen size. A color architecture that balanced institutional trust with human warmth. A type scale and whitespace system that chose scannability over density every time. Core components with every state and variation documented, so the work would hold up in the hands of teams we'd never meet. And it had to reach past the website, into mobile, email, signage, even the presentation templates. When someone moves from a search result to an appointment to a hallway sign, it should feel like one institution walking with them.

As Associate Director, Experience Design at Digitas, my job was direction and protection. Six designers formed the core team, part of a larger shared pool with another Associate Director that flexed well past that when the roadmap needed it, and we partnered weekly to keep strategy and craft aligned. Our stakeholders were medical and administrative leaders, experts in their world and new to ours, so we didn't argue taste. We showed our reasoning, tied every decision back to the patient, and let the clarity make the case. The team's work earned the room.

Inside the file

Figma documentation

The Results

We built the foundation. MSK's team shipped it. It's live right now.

The foundation we delivered became the system MSK's internal team carried to production, and it's live on mskcc.org today. That handoff was the point. An agency system that only works with the agency in the room isn't a system, and this one kept going without us.

The experience that used to be fragmented now holds together across web, mobile, email, and the physical spaces patients move through. One institution, one voice, at every step of a journey nobody wants to be on.

This one stays with me for a different reason than the others. The scale was real and the craft was real, but the stakes were human. Somewhere right now a person is sitting down to read about their diagnosis, and the page in front of them is calm, clear, and built to help. The team did that. I got to lead them.