Michael J. Fox Foundation

In July 2016, the Michael J. Fox Foundation sought a partner to co-build a new website that reflects its brand and its role as a visionary funder in the Parkinson’s field. The site sits at the heart of the Foundation’s digital ecosystem and is its primary channel to a large, diverse audience.

It’s a platform for education, research tools, and action, and it had to empower in-house teams to manage a flexible, scalable system as the Foundation’s needs evolved. I joined the engagement at Mondo Robot to help figure out what we should build, and why.

The defining insight from discovery was structural. MichaelJFox.org is the catalyst for a value exchange between two very different audiences: B2C (patients, family, and friends) who give funding, action, and data, and B2B (researchers, clinicians, and industry) who give back research, results, and credibility.

Analytics underlined the urgency: roughly 70% of visitors saw only a single page, and nearly half spent under a minute on the site. The design challenge became clear, improve the experience to engage both audiences, attract more advocates, and increase the effectiveness of that value exchange.

Discovery was deliberately broad, and it was real research rather than a checkbox. We ran a content audit, a competitive analysis, a comparative analysis of more than 30 organizations, stakeholder interviews, an analytics review across Google and Adobe, and a user survey sent to roughly 269,000 supporters and researchers that returned over 3,800 responses.

We synthesized all of it, then met in person for a collaborative workshop in October 2016, mapping the existing flows step by step and capturing How Might We notes that we organized and prioritized as a team.

We mapped four real journeys step by step and turned each into How Might We questions to steer the design:

All of that synthesis pointed to three strategic areas of opportunity. First, architect an intentional content life cycle, so content is showcased, made comprehensible in plain language, and richly related to other content. Second, provide personalized wayfinding through a fragmented ecosystem of subdomains and separate properties: clear information architecture, better navigation, a consolidated experience. Third, create greater connection with the audience through personalization and a genuine sense that what people do has impact.

These rolled up into a vision and a brand personality, approachable, optimistic, straight-forward, knowledgeable, innovative, that gave the whole team a shared compass for every decision that followed.

With the strategy set, I focused on the interactions and animations, intentionally subtle moments meant to reinforce the brand while improving clarity, flow, and usability.

I worked closely with the front-end engineering team so the ideas translated cleanly into production, documenting each interaction with detailed notes and behavior guidelines to keep design intent and implementation aligned.

The most valuable thing I did here was reframe a website project as a value-exchange problem between two audiences. That single lens made the priorities obvious and gave a sprawling content ecosystem a reason to get organized.

And broad, honest discovery earns the right to design. The survey, interviews, analytics, and workshop weren’t throat-clearing; they’re what made every later decision defensible, all the way down to the motion.