Making health topics accessible to everyone

The Swiss Red Cross represents Switzerland's oldest and largest relief agency. In the context of their health support program, the Swiss Red Cross gathers information and research on a range of health topics and aims to make it accessible in up to 50 languages. This content used to be distributed across four platforms, with each platform aimed at a specific audience ranging from health professionals to refugees. As part of their strategic initiative, SRC decided to merge these four websites into a single portal: migesplus.ch.

SRC was looking for a partner to further iterate on their initial design proposal and implement both front- and backend. We convinced with our holistic approach, which encompassed not only the technological expertise, but focused on the User Experience like for instance the overall structure of the content and the coaching of content creators in using their content management system.

Making the platform easier navigate for readers and SRC’s content team

Nothing went beyond mere technical implementation by proposing an effective solution for both readers and SRC who needs to maintain migesplus. Migesplus uses a modern and scalable tech-stack with Contentful, as head-less CMS, a Vue.js/ Nuxt.js-based frontend and a powerful Algolia search engine. The technological base was set up in a way that laid the foundation to further iterate on the platform.

Together with SRC’s content team, we iterated on the information architecture of migesplus.ch to create a solid base. While the platform still serves only one target group, the health care professionals, this iterated version already laid the foundation to present information to all target groups in a manner so that they would easily find the information relevant to them. The new organisation of the content benefited the users looking for health information with a global topics overview and specific collections dedicated to the different target groups. The content creators were enabled to easily structure and rework the different content types.

Filling in the gaps in SRC’s basic design to create a coherent platform

Designer Sarah worked with a basic website design provided by the SRC and fleshed out how the different platforms and their content types for the different target groups could come together visually. We completed the first version of the design provided by SRC and in doing so, dedicated particular attention to interactions, the visual design and the optimisation for different devices (responsiveness).

We supported the SRC content team with content guidelines to assure consistency across the whole platform. Furthermore, we helped them publish the reworked content, which had to be adapted to the new technical system, to enable them to use the technical possibilities of migesplus to its full extent.

With our work on the technology stack and coherent design, we laid a solid foundation for the health platform to be expanded organically with more content and a long-term collaboration with the SRC. While this release of the platform is still aimed at health care professionals only, it could in the future serve an even greater range of audiences than it serves now.