EMA WEBSITE
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Website Design
2024
FROM PROBLEM
TO DESIGN
Our Process
EMA Research is a behavioral science lab in the Department of Psychology at Indiana Wesleyan University. The lab uses smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment to run studies on gratitude, compassion, and hope alongside drug courts, assisted living facilities, student development offices, and churches, and it built its own research software along the way.
We partnered with EMA Research to build an identity and a website equal to the ambition of the science, and to make a specialized method legible to the students, funders, and participants the lab depends on.
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The lab's public face did not match the quality of its research. It also struggled to communicate in accessible terms, which is a common “curse of knowledge” problem heavy with jargon in the industry.
The single hardest thing to communicate was visual, what the EMA method actually does minute to minute, was nowhere explained. -
01 : Visual Design
A visual system that carries the lab's credibility into every context it works in.
02 : Icon and Motion SystemA vocabulary for the three things a visitor most often wants: what the lab has discovered, how it applies to their life, and the software the lab developed.
03 : Page Design
Page layout components compatible with the WordPress theme used.
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EMA Research now has a front door that matches the good work behind it. The homepage opens on the question the lab is actually asking, "What ways of life promote our collective growth?", and the methodology sits one scroll below it, animated, where it can be easily understood.
The use of the visual system holds up best for a lab that publishes continuously and recruits a new cohort of research assistants every year, that portability is the point.
Good research deserves to be found, and even though the design doesn’t change EMA Research studies, it did change how many people get far enough in to care.
SYSTEM
ANIMATIONS
LAYOUTS
