The Challenge
Create a comprehensive online resource guide to understanding and coping with
breast cancer regardless of culture and language.
Our Solution
Design, implement and scale a cross-cultural resource to enable conversation,
interaction and hope in the wake of diagnosis on the Web and mobile devices.
+5 Million
Video Interactions
125,000
Q&A Interactions
Featured
By the App Store

Discovery
Focusing the efforts
We begin every project with focused discovery sessions. These sessions include
extensive research and analysis into potential platforms, use cases and architecture
decisions. Our research identified the need for an illustrated design style that
depicted breast cancer and the female body in a socially acceptable manner. Users also
needed a social community to discuss personal questions on this sensitive topic.


User Experience
Crafting the community
Creating a warm and friendly user experience across multiple languages, locales and
cultures was crucial to the success of the Beyond the Shock platform. Language and
culture aside, the approach also needed to have a cohesive user experience across four
different device platforms.
We put considerable focus on how this sensitive topic could be discussed globally.
To enhance the experience and provide a concise method for education, motion graphics
videos were added to the mix. These videos provided a design-independent means to
provide educational content. Over 70 minutes of chapter-based video content were
produced for the site launch.

Content Strategy
Future-friendly content
From the outset, Beyond the Shock was designed to handle content from multiple languages.
To better serve the community, and make administration easier for community managers, a custom content management system was implemented. This content system manages translations for English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Mandarin.
To accomodate more verbose languages, an additional 30% of space was allowed for the translation of content.
“Design savvy. Brilliant. Friendly. These guys know the pulse of digital.”
Doug
Programs Director at NBCF

Development
Cross-platform engineering
Beyond the Shock has to serve a wealth of content quickly. With a combination of
traditional database, lightning fast key-value storage, flat files and caching we
were able to achieve excellent load times and traffic management for a large number of
users. We built a custom content management system offering translations in English,
Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Mandarin.

