Findacure UK
2017
Rebuilding a rare disease charity's digital home from scratch
Findacure is a UK-based rare disease charity connecting patients, caregivers, and researchers. Their website was out of date, hard to navigate, and failing its users — 84% of whom were first-time visitors searching for critical health information. In 2017, I led the end-to-end redesign: research, IA, wireframes, and 6 delivered hi-fi pages.
Overview
A site that was failing its most vulnerable users
The Findacure team knew it, and the brief said it plainly — the site didn't flow from page to page, people couldn't find what they came for, and the call to donate was weak. Three audiences (patients, caregivers, and donors) all landed on one undirected homepage, built on a legacy codebase the team couldn't safely update.
Straight from the Findacure brief
“The website doesn't flow well from page to page. Often people come for something specific but find it hard to locate. The call to action to donate is very weak.”
— Findacure Internal Brief, 2017
Three problems the brief made plain
Undocumented codebase
Legacy PHP/CSS left by the previous developer — the team couldn't update the site without breaking it.
Zero donation visibility
The charity's primary revenue driver was buried. No persistent CTA existed anywhere on the site.
How 4 research methods exposed a broken navigation — and led to a redesign that served 3 audiences
Rather than jumping straight to wireframes, I ran a stakeholder brief, online survey, card sort, and tree test. Every method pointed to the same diagnosis: users were arriving with clear goals — find rare disease information, discover events, learn about drug repurposing — but the navigation was organised around content type, not user need. Fixing the IA was the single highest-leverage change I could make.
4 research methods before drawing a single wireframe
What the survey revealed
WHO PARTICIPATED
9 respondents across 5 user types
WHY THEY VISITED
Top reasons users came to the site
Card sort + tree test confirmed the IA was broken
3 personas that shaped every design decision
Design decision 01
Restructuring the IA around user goals, not content categories
Card sorting revealed users think by audience type — patient, researcher, professional — not by content format. I rebuilt the nav from 5 ambiguous categories into 4 clear audience pathways: Rare Diseases, Drug Repurposing, Events, and About. Tree testing confirmed the new structure reduced navigation errors by 60%.
Before and after: navigation restructure
66.7% of survey respondents came to the site specifically for rare disease information. Previously buried inside 'Our Work' — 2 levels deep. Now top-level primary navigation.
Research insight
Users weren't failing — the site was
Before designing anything, I mapped the 2016 user experience from first landing to failed task. The pattern was stark: users arrived with hope, hit ambiguous navigation, and left without what they came for. This wasn't a content problem — the charity was doing meaningful work. It was a structural problem. The journey map gave every subsequent design decision a clear "before" state to improve against.
Journey map: before and after redesign
Design decision 02
Building the events calendar users had been asking for
88% of survey respondents said they wanted a calendar view of upcoming events — but the site had none. This was the clearest, most actionable gap in the research. I designed a filterable events listing page from scratch: searchable by event type, date, and audience, so no patient, caregiver, or researcher would miss a relevant workshop or webinar again. It also unlocked a persistent Donate CTA on every page, solving the buried revenue problem the stakeholder brief had flagged from the start.
Events calendar wireframe — built from scratch to meet the #1 unmet need
Design decision 03
Designing for warmth, credibility, and scan-ability
Findacure's users weren't just information-seekers — many were emotionally vulnerable. The old site felt clinical and institutional. I chose a warmer, human-centred visual system: clear type hierarchy, purpose-built page templates for each audience segment, and a drug repurposing page that made complex science feel approachable to non-specialists.
Before and after: visual design transformation
Retrospective
A new navigation, a new calendar, and a warmer site for people who needed it most
The redesign delivered 6 hi-fi pages, a brand-new events calendar, and a restructured IA built around how users actually think — not how the organisation was structured internally. Findacure got a clearer, warmer digital home that connected patients, caregivers, and researchers to the resources they came for. Looking back, I'd push harder for usability testing with rare disease patients before handoff — their feedback on information hierarchy would have been the most valuable signal of all.
6 pages redesigned and delivered
Tara has been incredibly helpful in all aspects of the re-development of our website. As a small team with no in-house expertise, her help collecting user data, structuring the sitemap, and designing and customising the pages has been invaluable. Tara is a very patient person and a good teacher; we really appreciate how she has explained everything to us in simple terms.
