ALCHEMY // case study

Gynuity Guide for Medical Abortion During COVID-19

When Gynuity Health Projects approached me with this project, I knew it was a perfect opportunity for ALCHEMY, a transformative process I created that re-imagines and adapts a product, usually from a dense wall of text into a dynamic and user-friendly document.

The Challenge.

We began with an assessment of the audience and how they’ll most likely interact with the information. In this case, the end users are reproductive health care providers across the globe, some in remote locations, with access to devices, but not necessary WiFi. This meant that a stand-alone mobile site or app wasn’t feasible. But the information still needed to be accessible on mobile devices to facilitate remote phone consults with patients. Oh, and it needed to be in six languages!

The Framework.

First I sold them on the format. Rather than designing in letter-size or A4, and creating a PDF that would be printable but impossible to read on a smart phone, I suggested a PDF that was scaled like a mobile app, with internal navigation so readers could jump between sections. Having a scrolling format would easily expand to the various lengths of different languages, and the text could be large enough to read on a phone without having to repeatedly zoom in and out.

The Edit.

After getting buy-in on the format, I dove into editing. Clients, understandably, write from their own perspective. Accustomed to an academic style and lengthy medical studies, the content came to me with too little hierarchy, long and dense paragraphs, lots of bullets, and an internal cross-referencing that wouldn’t work in a mobile format. The document needed to be broken up and rearranged for clarity to maximize reading on a small screen. I organized the content into six distinct sections, with headings and subheadings underneath, as well as shorter paragraphs to make it digestible and easier to access, and reorganized it to ensure that all content was aligned with the proper section.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1596555412376{padding-right: 50px !important;padding-left: 50px !important;}”]

Content, before and after.

Use the slider in the middle to toggle from the original content on the left, and the revised content on the right with clearly defined sections, shorter and easier to digest paragraphs, fewer bullets, and better overall structure.

Designing a Mobile-Friendly PDF.

Once we settled on content revisions, I set to work designing a clean and easy format for what was still a lot of content. It was important that the reader know what section they were in, so I color coded each section in the Table of Contents, which carried through the document. I designed custom icons to open each section, and diagonal backgrounds went from color to grey to white, both holding the section together while also helping the reader to not lose their place. The design is modern and friendly, with a feel of accessibility and possibility, something that felt important during the unprecedented stress of the COVID-19 epidemic.

To make the document user friendly, I built navigation into the Table of Contents through page links that clicked through to the individual sections, and added an up arrow icon at the end of each subsection taking the reader back to the Table of Contents. External resources and references were also linked throughout the document. Each language was later reformatted in letter/A4 to enable localized printing.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1612055571755{padding-right: 50px !important;padding-bottom: 20px !important;padding-left: 50px !important;}”]

Enabling Critical Care during an Unprecedented Time.

The final product is dynamic and user-friendly. It clearly outlines the process of providing care—from screening to preparation to the regimen to follow-up—in a format that retains all the critical medical guidance and is also digestible, accessible, and easy to navigate. And because it’s available in six languages, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic, it is already helping providers in the field offer critical care to their patients during COVID-19.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]