The challenge

ALS patients and their caregivers face tremendous challenges. A lot of information needs to be processed and many hard decisions need to be made. Each ALS patient is unique and finds themselves at a different stage in their journey. The Les Turner ALS Foundation was looking for a way to help ALS patients learn about their options and make informed decisions.

What we did

In close collaboration with people living with ALS, caregivers, researchers, and clinicians, we created a suite of interactive decision aid tools that communicate complex health information in an accessible and easy-to-understand way. Throughout the app, simple questions are asked about the patient's preferences. At the end, a summary is provided to help with decision-making and inform future conversations.

I was responsible for interaction design (IxD), user flows, and most of the visual design. I created custom iconography to illustrate complex ideas and ensured the tool is highly usable and accessible for people at various stages in their ALS journey.

Lessons learned

While we took great care to make the tools accessible and user-friendly from the start, usability testing confirmed that it pays off to go above and beyond.

We designed the tools to be calming, with each step in the flow as focused and uncluttered as possible. We followed accessibility best practices throughout — minimum 16px body font, Level AA color contrast, even tweaking the client's brand colors slightly to hit that threshold. We also made sure nothing breaks when people use browser tools like zoom or high-contrast mode.

The Les Turner brand uses Roboto as their default font, which helped — it's clean, readable, and well-suited for this kind of tool. Our audiences confirmed that the focused, uncluttered design was appreciated.

Full transparency: we were a bit surprised to learn that 16px was still a touch too small for some users. Only one person called it out directly, but we noticed a few others zooming in slightly during testing. A small tweak fixed it, and subsequent testing confirmed the new default size worked.

Why it matters

We hear over and over again how much of an impact these tools have and how they make a real difference in the lives of ALS patients and their caregivers. The suite of decision aid tools was very well received and continues to be celebrated by industry professionals and ALS experts.

In 2022, the Decision Aid Tools were recognized with a ClearMark Award for best app.