The Irreverent StudioDesign for knowledge translation in health
Designing and promoting a clinical guide to improve the safety of medication use for elderly patients during transitions of care
About the project
| client | Louise Papillon-Ferland, professor at the faculty of Pharmacy of Université de Montréal |
|---|---|
| year | 2024 |
| role | Visual designer |
| the challenge | Design a document that stands out visually and allow their audience to quickly find and understand the key points presented in the article |
| the solution | We created an interactive document with a user-friendly navigation and intuitive layout which emphasises key information, developped an illustrated interactive summary of the full document and produced branded promotional materials for social media and email marketing. |
As the attention of healthcare professionals is stretched thin between growing responsibilities and the need to sift through the internet to stay updated on their clinical practice, it is increasingly important for knowledge translation tools in health to be well-designed and easy to use.
For this project, we worked with a team of researchers of the Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM) to design an interactive guide to help the health community implement the findings of their newly published research summarised into a list of key principles to design a medication discharge for hospitalised elderly patients.
Being a fellow pharmacist, we share a common understanding of the importance of our client’s end goal, the technical language they use, as well as the message they want to convey to their target audience. Based on discussions with our client as well as our dual expertise as a designer and member of their target demographics, we were thus able to come up with clear design goals to capture the attention of our audience (pharmacists, physicians, nurses, managers and professionals organisations) and create a unique tool :
- Enhance Readability and Accessibility : Create a clear information hierarchy to guide readers to the most critical sections.
- Ensure cross-platform appeal: Ensure that the guide and promotional materials were visually engaging both online and in print
- Bilingual Design Considerations : Ensure that the layout worked seamlessly in English and French.
- Consistency Across Media : Ensuring brand consistency across the guide and promotional materials
A clear information hierarchy is critical to guide readers through the document’s content and ensure that they can easily understand the information presented.
We performed a thorough review of the article’s content to identify key messages and action points. Headings, subheadings, and callouts structure the content in a way that allowed for quick scanning and easy navigation.
A vibrant colour palette with bold yet soothing accent colors was chosen to create a colour code so that readers can easily recognise high priority information.
As each principle was highlighted in its own page in the document. One of the biggest challenges was to create a layout which would be adaptable enough to accomodate word counts which could differ widely from one principle to the other while look good in the French and English versions, whose word counts differ due to the uniqueness of the language.
Interactive elements, like clickable links, a dynamic table of contents and a tab navigation structure, were included in the digital version. And we also developped an clickable illustration summarising the list of principles described in the guide.
A dynamic pdf document became a good compromise as our client didn’t have a need for a website to present their research article nor the budget for it but wanted easy navigability throughout the document.
The guide was designed with both digital and print formats in mind, ensuring that the layout would work equally well on screen and on paper.
The branded visual design was applied consistently across the guide posters, and social media materials, ensuring that the audience could easily associate all materials with the guide.
A custom illustration was developped for the cover of the guide showing the different steps of transition of care once the patient leaves the hospital. These assets were then reused in the promotional materials.
