ADNI
Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
A website for researchers and for study recruitment
Client
University of Southern California (USC), University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
Year
2022-2023
Leading a team to rebuild how researchers access data
The ADNI website has existed for nearly 20 years with multiple teams adding features over time. Each team optimized their own goals, leading to a user experience which was frustrating for researchers; they had difficulty finding the information and data they needed. I led an effort to modernize the site and to improve the user flow for data access, achieving results beyond expectations.
Challenges
Disparate incentives
Since the launch of the original ADNI website in the early 2000s previous teams updated many individual components, focusing on small iterative items to add content or to fix problems that met immediate goals. Each new page that was created expanded the navigation until it became so large that users had difficulty finding content. Additional links within individual pages led to more pages not included in the main navigation or the footer. Major tech and UX issues were often not addressed, and eventually they spanned the entire site experience.
A long, difficult flow needed to be simplified
Significant improvements would require the team to have a clear vision and direction for the user experience as a whole. This required a new design system that could be applied to the entire site. Through multiple phases of the study an enormous amount of information had been added to the site without clear pathways to it, making the process to find needed information far more difficult than people realized. There site map was large yet still incomplete, the search feature was limited, and the navigation was unclear and had become too complex. Visualizing a number of these problems throughout the site and showing them to the team made them clear and helped us build a better solution together.
Approach
Aligning the teams
We needed to uncover requirements for finding solutions and we achieved it through design sprints. I had discussions with design and development leaders from different teams, culminating in meetings with researchers to present our solutions. The concepts created were the shared principles and goals needed to make the project a success. Several major product ideas from the sprints reshaped the flow for both study researchers and study participants.
Eliminating redundant concepts and adding new features
Because distributing new research findings and related information was such a priority, teams had crammed the flow full of content and into multiple places to ensure researchers would see it. Content was regularly copied from other product surfaces, and then duplicated again within multiple pages.
I worked with the teams to understand why components were arranged this way. We then worked together to determine which content to eliminate, combine, or leave in each area.
A Hub Experience
Many of the problems of the existing site - packed pages, redundant content, and lack of obvious next steps - stemmed from using a multi-step flow. We found ways to eliminate steps and to direct users more intuitively. This reduced the number of pages, streamlined the content, and provided single click solutions.
After exploring several concepts, the approach which performed best in user research and was preferred by the lead investigator was creating a hub on landing. Instead of a seemingly endless flow through top navigation, modals could house mini flows so users could immediately navigate necessary steps from the home page. This provided a set of clear steps up front about where to find information.
The general public, either seeking study information or interested in participating, needed only to click the Participate button to get all of the information and to sign up.
New and returning researchers could quickly navigate to the pages containing all the details for obtaining data on each phase of the study through the Access Data button.
Researchers were given a starting point for study documentation, news, and other resources beyond the data by clicking the Learn more button.
A new dashboard was created to give users the most important statistics in a summary and at a glance, and a new footer was created to improve the site map. A block in the footer was created for urgent news and/or action items, solving the redundancy problem. The new footer was designed to be especially beneficial to returning users; instead of going through the previous multi-step and multi-page flow to reach specific and related resources they could simply go directly to the specific curated content from the footer on every page.
On pages where more steps were required, we employed a succinct list with clear steps and calls-to-action. Even when a considerable amount of work was required to access the data or resource a user wanted, research showed that the work didn’t feel as significant because users had a clear picture up front of what to expect.
Pages which contained large amounts of text were organized with additional side navigation. This proved to be helpful in the same way as the lists of clear steps in that it gave users an immediate visualization of what was contained on the page and where they could expect to find it. Color coded tables updated with new data were employed to also give researchers the ability to quickly see the types of data available from each phase of the study.
Results
Dramatically improved functionality
Reducing the old information access flow to single pages with clearly defined action steps to go further was enormously successful. The redesign project was a dramatic step-function improvement far beyond what had been accomplished with iterative updates.
Immediate adoption
The site design was quickly approved and put into development after seeing the results from user research and preliminary experiments.
A new way of working
At the start, I knew I’d need to enlist the help of every team for the project to be successful. I worked to make sure that designers, developers, and researchers who rarely worked together felt like part of one shared effort. This was one of the only times that so many teams have come together to make a dramatic shift to a long-term study, bringing a new level of collaboration.