Overview

Northwestern Medicine and West Health set up an accelerator to optimize and expand access to the Collaborative Behavioral Health Program: integrating psychiatric care within primary care at NM, and building evidence-based tools and resources so the model can be adopted quickly across Chicago and the country.

The brief: design and develop a user-friendly, visually appealing and informative new website that communicates the accelerator’s mission, services and resources.

Discovery

The site was small and separate from nm.org, and the existing one had little to no analytics, so discovery leaned on people rather than data.

We ran collaborative sessions to gather input and align on the strategic foundation, opportunities and personas: visioning and persona workshops with NM, West Health and Meadows stakeholders, audience interviews, and a tech meeting between NM and our development team. The workshops centered on three activities:

1. I like, I wish, I wonder
2. Goal setting
3. Audience empathy: think, feel, do

One identity, three partners

The accelerator brings together three organizations: Northwestern Medicine, West Health and the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. The site needed an identity that belonged to all three, so we created a digital design system based on the existing NM brand that brings in West Health’s colors as secondary to NM’s purples and teals.

The visual idea was “a promising spectrum.” Mental health is often described as a spectrum because of its range of diagnoses and challenges, and the accelerator shines a new light of promise across it, for patients, family members, care providers and more. The palette runs that spectrum, and the type pairs Poppins (NM.org’s 2024 vision) for headlines with Open Sans (NM.org today) for text.

Content mapping & navigation

The workshops were run by my director. My part came next: content mapping, and making sure the navigation and the overall journey were functional and easy to use.

That meant mapping every piece of content to where people would actually look for it, and keeping the navigation small, so the path from the mission to the accelerator’s services and resources stayed clear for every audience the workshops surfaced.