From medicine to music

Greenwich Biosciences is a pharmaceutical company dedicated to researching and delivering cannabinoid medicines. One of their products treats severe seizure disorders in patients as young as 12 months.

These children grow up with cognitive impairment issues and may struggle to express themselves verbally. Instead, they often turn to art as a form of self-expression.

To help bridge physical expression back to verbal expression, Greenwich Biosciences has developed Unspoken Symphony—a website that automatically transforms artwork into music using research-based methodologies, allowing parents to hear their children for the very first time.

The challenge

How can we increase engagement?

Unspoken Symphony launched with a positive reception, however, Greenwich Biosciences has noticed that the platform is not catching on with the fervor that they initially hoped for. Most parents only used the platform once or twice and the social share function, a key part of increasing public visibility, was rarely used.

The issues

Breaking down the problem

After performing a site audit and a heuristic evaluation, I identified a few issues that could be negatively impacting overall user engagement:

Disconnect between the aesthetics, purpose, and audience. The overall tone of the site is geared towards a younger audience. It is misaligned with the name “Unspoken Symphony”, which evokes feelings of a more elevated experience, and the powerful narrative of helping parents hear their children express themselves.
Lack of features that encourage return visits. The site functions as a single-use tool without room to personalize the experience for individual users.
Long, multistep process to create a symphony. In addition, parents returning to create another symphony are required to go through the entire process without the ability to save their form responses for the future.
Social sharing is not approached from the user’s perspective. Clicking the social icons shares the entire website property. Parents are unable to share just their piece of artwork to their social channels.

The approach

Reestablish our foundational direction

The crux of this project required going back to the beginning and reaffirming who our main target audience was—the parents. What do we want them to feel when they come to this site? What are they looking for? What would keep them coming back?

Humans are naturally programmed to respond to and engage with stories. A consistent narrative from the brand voice to the visual design would be needed to ensure that parents stayed engaged with this story. By refocusing on what Unspoken Symphony was (a mechanism of connection for parents), a new experience was crafted that conveyed the power and emotion of hearing their child for the first time.

01

Designing for parents

The website was overhauled to reflect a more sophisticated viewing experience. The goal was to have the parent feel as if they were viewing their child's artwork in an art gallery—a quiet, contemplative space that allows you to focus on the piece in front of you.

02

A space for you and your loved ones

The public gallery is designed for discovery and exploration but what if you just want to see art from your own family? When a parent signs up for an account, they can begin saving their created symphonies to their private gallery. Think of it as a curated space where you have a personal connection to every artist. From there, parents can share a private link for grandma and grandpa to enjoy as well.

03

Fewer steps between you and your masterpiece

Instead of retyping artist information with every piece of artwork uploaded, parents can create a profile for each one of their children (whether they have difficulty communicating or not). This streamlines symphony creation and removes repetitive actions for returning parents. Combined with introducing an account log in, this speeds up symphony creation by 36% compared to the original flow.

04

Sharing is caring

In addition to increasing the frequency of the share icons at more relevant touchpoints, each generated social post is now personalized with the child's artwork making it easier for the parent to share their child's symphony with the world.

The results

An updated experience that will keeping parents coming back again and again

With this being a conceptual project, specific analytics and benchmarks were not available. However, in a real-world scenario, these are the metrics that we would be tracking before and after the updates to measure any potential improvements:

The number of new and repeat visitors to the platform
The number of symphonies created per parent
The number of social shares

next steps

The music doesn't stop here

Some exciting ideas came up along the way, however, due to time constraints, they had to be deprioritized to focus on larger components of the overall experience. Iterations in the future could work on exploring:

Ability to edit symphonies. Allowing parents to go back and edit the details of a symphony once it has been saved to their gallery would give them reasons to return.
Featured galleries. The epilepsy community is a tight knit one. Creating temporary homepage experiences during relevant seizure awareness days (ex. LGS Awareness Day, TSC Awareness Day, etc.) may help drive additional traffic.
Merchandise collaborations. Working with vendors such as Vinylify to create custom vinyl records that parents could purchase or send as gifts may bring visitors during the holiday seasons.

prototype

THIS CONCEPT WAS DESIGNED WITH a WEBGL EXPERIENCE IN MIND including A 3D ENDLESS CANVAS AND mouse position animations. DUE TO LIMITATIONS IN THE PROTOTYPING SOFTWARE, THIS IS NOT SHOWN.