case_file.exe — /work/NCODA Website Redesign

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NCODA Website Redesign

A brand and platform redesign for NCODA, a member association serving medically integrated oncology practices. The work reconciled two structurally opposed audiences — clinicians who pay nothing and pharmaceutical partners who fund the organization — around a resource library built for findability first.

[ SYS_STAT ]

CLIENT

NCODA (National Community Oncology Dispensing Association)

SECTOR

Healthcare / Oncology / Member Association

YEAR

2024–2025

ROLE

Art Director (Strategy, Scope & Surface)

DELIVERY

7–9 months

proc_uptime 00:00:21

The redesigned NCODA homepage shown on a laptop in a clinical setting

Strategic Brief & Constraints

> run brief.txt

NCODA, the National Community Oncology Dispensing Association, is a national member organization for medically integrated oncology practices. Its model is unusual: clinicians and oncology pharmacists are members and pay nothing, while pharmaceutical companies pay as partners for the opportunity to deliver continuing education. Revenue depends entirely on making the partner relationship worth funding, while the member experience has to stay generous and unrestricted.

By 2024 the organization's WordPress site had grown organically for years, accumulating custom functionality built around the needs of individual partners. The result worked against its own goals: clinical resources were hard to find, the brand read as dated against a modernizing category, and the association was preparing to move member management off Higher Logic and onto Salesforce.

I joined as Art Director through Taoti Creative, a Washington DC agency. My contribution concentrated on three planes of the experience — strategy, scope, and surface — while information architecture and wireframing were carried by other members of the team as I moved between assignments.

[ DELIVERABLES ]

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Brand Audit & Strategy

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Audience Archetypes

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Scope & Content Strategy

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Art Direction

›

Visual Design System

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Key Page Design

research-notes.log — constraints / audience / inputs

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[ 01 ]

Constraints

The core challenge was designing for two audiences whose relationship to the organization is structurally opposed. Members receive everything for free and judge the site on how quickly they can reach clinical guidance. Partners fund the organization and judge it on visibility, reach, and the credibility of the audience they are paying to reach. One homepage had to serve both without making either feel like the secondary concern.

Beneath that sat three further constraints: years of bespoke functionality that had to survive a platform migration, a resource taxonomy that had stopped scaling with the library it organized, and a brand refresh running in parallel with the redesign rather than ahead of it.

[ 02 ]

Audience

Oncology pharmacists and clinicians, practice and pharmacy leadership, and pharmaceutical industry partners

[ 03 ]

Discovery Inputs

Brand audit, stakeholder conversations, RFP goals, existing site and content inventory, three audience archetypes with personas, and competitive association references

[ KEY INSIGHTS ]

A free-membership model means the site must prove its worth to partners while asking nothing of members

Findability of clinical resources moved the primary metric more than any visual refresh could

Practice leadership adopts on behalf of a whole care team, so resources had to signal institutional credibility

Architecture & Service Design

[ INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE ]

Structure before surface

Strategy and scope came first. The brand audit set direction for a refreshed identity that could modernize the organization without discarding the equity in the NCODA name, which leadership was actively reconsidering. Scope decisions followed from the archetypes: resource taxonomy was prioritized over cosmetic change, the podcast program was restructured to publish episodes individually rather than bundling a season onto a single page, and a lighter permission model replaced a heavier approach to gated content.

On the surface plane I set the art direction and the visual system. Beaufort Pro carries headlines with enough warmth to read as human rather than institutional, paired with Red Hat Text for the dense clinical body copy that makes up most of the site. A deep NCODA Blue and navy anchor the palette for authority, a warm neutral ground keeps long resource pages from feeling sterile, and orange is reserved almost entirely for interactive elements so calls to action never compete with content. The system had to hold across everything from a marketing homepage to a resource library hundreds of rows deep.

service-flow.log — journey / handoffs / risk

Discovery ran as a brand audit alongside stakeholder conversations, a content inventory, and a landscape review of comparable associations. The client moved quickly and trusted the team to lead, which put more weight on audit findings than on an extended interview cycle.

The work produced three audience archetypes, each with a supporting persona. The first was the practicing clinician, the oncology pharmacist who arrives with a specific clinical question and measures the site by how few clicks separate them from a Positive Quality Intervention. The second was practice and pharmacy leadership, who adopt resources on behalf of an entire care team and need institutional credibility before standardizing on them. The third was the pharmaceutical partner, evaluating whether the audience and the education platform justify continued investment.

The clearest finding was that downloads of Positive Quality Interventions were the organization's most important measure of success, and that findability, not visual refresh, was the lever that moved it.

[ RESEARCH ARTIFACTS ]

No items found.

Conversion & UX Optimization

[ KEY UX DECISION ]

The homepage leads with mission rather than membership, then splits immediately into the two paths that carry the business: "Become a Member" for clinicians who pay nothing, and the resource entry point for the Positive Quality Interventions that drive the most repeat traffic.

research-notes.log — KEY INSIGHTS → DESIGN DIRECTION

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[ SIGNAL 01 ]

DESIGN SIGNAL

A free-membership model means the site must prove its worth to partners while asking nothing of members

[ SIGNAL 02 ]

DESIGN SIGNAL

Findability of clinical resources moved the primary metric more than any visual refresh could

[ SIGNAL 03 ]

DESIGN SIGNAL

Practice leadership adopts on behalf of a whole care team, so resources had to signal institutional credibility

Visual System & Accessibility

Font Selection

Beaufort Pro

Heading Selection

Beaufort Pro Regular

Subheading Selection

Red Hat Text Medium

Paragraph Selection

To modernize NCODA without losing its clinical authority, I built a visual system around a warm neutral ground, a deep blue and navy for institutional trust, and a single reserved orange for interaction. Beaufort Pro sets headlines with warmth, while Red Hat Text carries the dense clinical body copy that makes up the majority of the site.

Color Palette

[ TOKEN: PRIMARY ]

#030abc

[ TOKEN: SECONDARY ]

#f2b705

[ TOKEN: SURFACE ]

#232323

[ TOKEN: GRAY ]

#9c9c9c

[ TOKEN: NEUTRAL ]

#f6f7f9

[ TOKEN: WHITE ]