“The website looks great, thank you so much for all your hard work – initial feedback has been really positive.”

Dr Kate Alford, Research Fellow in HIV and Neurology

The website structure, content and language were co-designed with a great group of volunteers from the Sussex Beacon, a charity that provides care and support for people living with HIV.

To support the development we carried out a discovery workshop with the team to understand their hopes and concerns about developing this new resource and used it to not only learn about these challenges but also identify key ingredients for success. These included:

• Giving people more power over their lives with clear steps and resources
• Being honest but also providing comfort to reduce worry where possible
• Linking the website to other resources to make sure it's part of a wider community of care

This led to the development of an initial design concept where we used a simple structure, a range of warm colours and tones and a logo based around ‘thinking and hiv’ to test and develop language and a potential visual direction with our volunteers. 

These co-design workshops are great opportunities to learn practical and emotional responses to possible design directions and we always learn a huge amount. Participants had great suggestions on visual direction and colours, initially liked the title and wanted us to avoid pinks and add a search button. They wanted us to make sure it was easy to use and accessible and asked for an FAQ section, suggestions for brain exercises and more links to local or online community support.

Together with this feedback, we prepared a development document so that Kate and the team from BSMS could share more detailed content and prepared a follow-on design for a second workshop.

We shared the updated design direction and asked participants to look through a range of example pages across the whole site. They liked the brighter colour palette, the mix of illustrations and photography and decided that, after thinking further, they preferred to call the site Memory and HIV instead.

The website is now live and we’re excited to hear how it’s being used by people living with HIV, by the carers and by the medical teams that will also benefit from this new resource.

If you’re interested in using design to tackle global challenges in health, science, education and ecology do get in touch.