Background
Multiple Sclerosis Association of America (MSAA) is a non-profit organization focused on providing resources and support to members of the MS community. MSAA works with numerous donors to help fund their organization, including physicians and those in the pharmaceutical industry.
Project Goals
The goal of this project was to develop a new section within their robust existing website that provided the MSAA community with unbiased treatment options. To help support this, we were to also develop several videos featuring doctors who could explain what the treatments were, and real patients who could speak to what to expect, all while remaining neutral and leaving this decision up to the patient.
Challenges / Lessons Learned
Approaching this problem from an unbiased place proved to be much more challenging than anyone expected, you want to provide factual information and sometimes this can appear as a negative side effect. This new set of pages was really a decision making tool, so from a UX standpoint, even providing options to help a user sort and filter could unintentionally create bias; for example, using a sort by efficacy or potency could be construed as some of the treatments are better/worse than.
As in most agencies, the business model often supports a waterfall approach, following a scope of work, budget and time period to complete. The video content took much longer than expected and there were several unexpected iterations in the wireframing stage. The time extended significantly on this and there were long pauses out of anyone's control, so staffing came and went. This project was eye opening not only for myself but also for the agency at large. While we did draft a few change orders, in hindsight, this should have been paused and rescoped to follow an iterative approach as there was so much uncertainty with this new tool.
Retrospective
We developed a new tool, one that does not exist in the US and made our client very happy. This was a labor of love on both my part and the clients’. This tool was developed to help as many people as possible, MS is a debilitating autoimmune disease and navigating treatment options can be overwhelming, especially when you are first diagnosed. This is a first of its kind tool, one that can be replicated for other disorders in the future. You can check out the tool live here.
