Services Offered
Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières (popularly known as MSF) cares for people affected by conflict, disease outbreaks, natural and human-made disasters, and exclusion from healthcare in more than 70 countries worldwide.
Given the incredible scale of the vital health care they provide, they also experience a high volume of website traffic.
With almost 2 million sessions per year, Doctors Without Borders US’s old Drupal 8 website wasn’t able to engage users. The user experience (frontend and editorial) wasn’t optimized either.
We began with a clear plan to redesign the website in incremental Sprints—and then, the unexpected. Thirteen Sprints in, the Russia-Ukraine conflict began. And that’s when Doctors Without Borders’ role would become instrumental in providing immediate medical aid to the victims of the war. We were prepared to help Doctors Without Borders provide their life-saving care when it was most needed.
We helped Doctors Without Borders break a record with mobile-optimized UX and information architecture, modular content blocks, and improved cross-navigation boosted visits and donations exponentially.
Doctors Without Borders website received over $40 million in the year 2022 through this platform to help Ukraine.
The Problem
Lack Of Consistency, Inefficient User Journeys
The Doctors Without Borders website plays a vital role in MSF's fundraising in the United States. But as we dug into the data, we found that more than 86% of these visitors had never been to the MSF website before.
There were four challenges that Doctors Without Borders needed to resolve:
- Unclear Navigation and Visual Structure The navigation of the website wasn’t intuitive. It repeated the same structure and content blocks on a majority of pages. There were too many details on the site navigation which failed to provide what the end user required.
- Unresponsive and Unintuitive Design Elements The website's frontend design was dated, and not crafted for access on all devices and interfaces. Also, every content type/template on the website had a generic design that failed to create an impact. Because of the unintuitive design, there was low engagement even when the visitor traffic was exceptional.
- Limited Editorial Options The same templates and content blocks for every page on the site made it impossible to publish information in an easy way. More flexibility was needed to create a variety of content to engage users.
- Launch at a High-Transaction Time This challenge came on at a later stage in the project. The new improved website needed to be launched right on the day the Russian incursion into Ukraine began.
The Solution
Achieving The Brand’s Vision With Efficient Collaboration
- Going Agile: As opposed to a traditional waterfall methodology, we worked over a year through a series of sprints with the Doctors Without Borders team. This approach minimized the burden of Doctors Without Borders’ stakeholders. We tailored the plan around availability and unexpected conflicts to enable them to participate in the process.
- Aiming at Brand Stickiness for Mobile Users First: At a scale such as 2 million sessions per year, even incremental design and platform improvements to optimize design funnels could make a big difference. So, that is what we did. Instead of touching every template, form, and piece of content, we prioritized specific modules, navigation changes, and high-yield experiences. We delivered a mix of website strategy, UX and UI design, development, analytics, and maintenance. This is how we did it:
- New, interactive content blocks which portray what the organization does
- Redesigned templates that the editor can work flexibly with
- Restructured site navigation (header and footer)
- Responsive design for all mobile devices and tablets
- Regular design reviews on the new look and user experience of the website
- Complete SEO review and consequent SEO fixes
The Impact
Better Conversion Journeys
The customer believed that the new site experience is data-driven and dramatically improved for mobile and first-time traffic. The new website presents impactful information that is easy to consume.
This increased the number of users that proceeded to the donation form by a whopping 54%. The association was able to raise more than $40 million for Ukraine’s medical aid in the year 2022 alone.
Underpinning the success of the updated UX is the technical reliability of the code delivered by Axelerant. Typically the weeks following a major update can be spent rooting out performance issues that only reveal themselves under stress of the public release.
Not only did the site perform well on day one of the major releases in March, it did so under a massive influx of traffic following the Ukraine invasion.
In addition to the high volume of traffic, fundraising in the context of a geopolitical crisis can draw the attention of bad actors. Attempted hacks and DDOS attacks quickly found their way to MSF’s new site.
After launch, we worked closely with MSF, as well as Pantheon and CDN providers on security approaches to keep the new website up and funding Doctors Without Borders' critical mission.
54% Increase in Traffic to Donation Form
The improvements in the website helped convert the massive inflow of visitors into donors. It increased internal traffic to the donation form by 54%.
Rising to Help Ukraine with $40M+
Launching the new website helped Doctors Without Borders set fundraising records during their response to Ukraine. They were able to raise more than $40 million online in the year 2022 alone to support the medical response in Ukraine.
This endeavor ensured Doctors Without Borders was able to rise to the support of Ukraine.
Critical Content with Real Impact
The modular features of the newly-revamped CMS allowed the customer to quickly create new organic content to describe their impact in Ukraine and the needs of their patients.
These flexible components helped Doctors Without Borders increase its content output helping to meet the content needs of audiences at a critical moment.