Case Study

MSK Giving

This was a complete design and content framework rework to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s donation wing, MSK Giving, and its’ sub-brands Fred’s Team and Cycle for Survival. My team and I went through all phases of design and delivery– from auditing the current website to working with client developers to ensure an MVP was giving users the best experience possible.

I was a constant on the project for all 2 years as team members rolled on and off the project. All work seen here is a portion of my direct contribution.

Company: Digitas
Years: 2022–2024
Role: Lead Experience Designer

My role included designing, prototyping, mentoring junior members, managing up with my directors, being the developers’ sole design touch point, managing the multi-brand design system, QA and much more.

OUR process

Discovery

In the first part of the process, we did an audit of what the current experience was.

Sprints

Each sprint had a 6-week cadence. In these sprints, we had 4 separate phases: landscape, ideation, finalization and delivery.

Wrap up

Wrap up was a 2-week period at the end of the project to ensure consistency between older sprints and more recent ones.

Support

Clients asked for continue support after the project ended to help with QA and helping with discussions surrounding an MVP.

Discovery

We first started with an audit of what MSK Giving, Fred’s Team and Cycle for Survival had available before we got involved. This surfaced a lot of issues we had to solve in the redesign and lead us down a strong strategy and content direction.

SPRINTS

Each sprint had a 6-week cadence. In these sprints, we had 4 separate phases: landscape, ideation, finalization and delivery.

Core responsibilities I had were file management (both internal files and client facing files), all design assistant with the developers and general file maintenance, i.e. final eyes on designs, components and documentation before handoff.

Week 1

Landscape

We took a look at what our competitors were doing when jumping to a new page type, i.e. looked at New York Road Racer’s when on the event page type. We then marked it with notes before creating key takeaways from what everyone brought together.

Week 2, 3 & 4

Ideation

The next 3 weeks, we jumped in to ideation. Any idea is a good idea and iteration rules all. This eventually led us to compiling a full page based on new components and thinking through the smaller details of how it all flows together.

Week 5

finalization

After ideation, we would finalize the detailed design we were working on. This would lead us to create any net new components in our design system before laying out a template based on the detailed design. We would also begin to document and annotate the pages and new components.

Week 6

delivery

Once all annotations and documentation was finalized, we would transition to delivery. This included transferring the designs to client files, clarifying to the developers what new components they had to be aware of, how page level templates functioned and answering any questions in twice-a-week stand ups with their developers.

wrap up

Wrap up was a 2-week period at the end of the project to ensure consistency between older sprints and more recent ones. We met in 4-hour blocks to go over our documentation as a design team before splitting up and addressing all inconsistencies found.

At the end, we delivered a completely new design system. We also delivered 24 new page templates & content workbooks and 7 detailed designs. All of this consisted of annotations and documentation that guided both the developers and the content authors on how to use a component or template.

MSK Giving Design System

All Ways to Give detailed design

Pathway Guide template

Listing Mega Tile documentation and delivery

Support

Clients asked for continue support after the project ended to help with QA and helping with discussions surrounding an MVP.

My role in this was mainly as the developer liaison, as well as fostering and leading discussions over what MVP should include. I helped both the developers and MSK stakeholders understand why we made the decisions we did, how components were meant to function and what purpose they were meant to serve.

Component QA

MVP work session

Thanks

This project was certainly one of my favorites I’ve gotten to work on in my career and it comes down to the people who I got to work on it with and the cause it was for!