Pain Relief Revolution

A Place To Learn and Engage

Context

Since its inception in 2015, Pain Relief Revolution has been a voice for better and more progressive approaches to pain management. Our goal has been to empower our readers in their battles for creating sustainable relief from pain by delivering knowledge and fresh ideas that might otherwise get missed at standard medical appointments and internet searches.

Challenge

Develop a robust community platform that would enable thousands of users to interact, create content, and engage with fellow users. No easy task when there are millions of websites in the medical landscape. Pain Relief Revolution came to us to create the brand, develop the network, and launch an ongoing social campaign to increase awareness and cultivate conversation about painreliefrevolution.com.

Strategy

Through extensive research, we discovered that much of the existing information about chronic pain on the web is unhelpful or even inaccurate. This finding became the basis for our strategy.

Content Strategy

Pain Relief Revolution can only be as good as its content, so ikonic designed a content strategy to target four of the most common topics sought after by chronic pain sufferers. We built a complete information architecture from the ground up to address more than twenty areas of expertise surrounding chronic pain.

We worked closely with Dr. Peter Abaci to extract dozens of articles from his first three books. These articles touched on most of the topics necessary to reach our platform launch goals, however, we needed to fill in some gaps.

Influencer Marketing

To flood the website with quality chronic pain resources, we sought the help of digital influencers: authors, journalists, educators. Ikonic recruited chronic pain experts who could contribute to the platform while continuing to spreading the word about Pain Relief Revolution on social and beyond.

social

With a network of influencers in place we knew we would be able to quickly grow an audience across social channels.

Creative

With this project, our design team created a brand identity from the ground up. We utilized the standard design sprint to brand narrative and visual standards – rapidly iterating until we achieved an informed solution. The core of the resulting visual standards is a color code for each of the four primary topic spaces. These colors are reflected in the header for each article and sidebar links to relevant articles.

The logo was also the result of nearly two weeks of collaborative design exercises. These exercises allowed for our team to break apart and work independently before sharing and commenting on each individual iteration. In the end, we presented two logo and brand concepts to Pain Relief Revolution and collectively agreed on the current iteration.

Platform Development

The result of our strategy is a community platform that introduces an innovative community experience while delivering trustworthy content to people who suffer from chronic pain.

The customized content management system (CMS) serves as both a customer-facing platform as well as a full-scale publishing platform. We developed custom publishing workflows and interfaces to empower contributors to log into the platform and manage their own articles. We also built a custom RSS feed parser to enable import of articles directly from our expert’s blog.

The intelligent platform tags hundreds of trustworthy health articles daily and presents them to users in a beautiful, customizable dashboard. Additionally, an algorithm processes the most relevant articles based on user preferences. This personalized digital experience empowers consumers to take control of their health and pain.

Results

Sometime after the platform was deployed, ikonic launched a highly-successful, ongoing social strategy to cultivate conversation among key influencers and experts. We have leveraged data, integrated analytics, and KPIs to help drive and shape our social activities and campaigns.

Since lauch, we’ve also established partnership opportunities and business relationships far beyond our original scope. We continued recruiting experts to the platform while making it easier for contributors to submit articles.

The platform has scaled to support heavy usage, and we have used user feedback and design sprints to continually optimize the user experience.

Milestones

More than 5,000 members have joined
Doubled the number of expert contributors – doctors and pain specialists
Content partnerships formed with about.com, Huffington Post, and WebMD.
Thousands of members tune in to monthly programming

Pain Relief Revolution

Learning about pain treatments should be a highly positive and enriching experience. Pain Relief Revolution is working to make that a reality.

Visit Website ➝

Learning about pain treatments should be a highly positive and enriching experience. Pain Relief Revolution is working to make that a reality.

Visit Website ➝

Activities:

Context

Dr. Peter Abaci, MD is a leading expert on chronic pain, author of four books on treating chronic pain, and owner of the Bay Area Pain & Wellness Center. Through his practice, Dr. Abaci discovered that much of the existing information about chronic pain on the web was often outdated, inaccurate, or just unhelpful. This led to his patients self-diagnosing or self-treating their chronic pain incorrectly.

Challenge

Dr. Abaci wanted to create a platform for himself and other highly qualified pain experts to expand their online presence while contributing to a reliable body of information for chronic pain sufferers. In 2015 he asked my team at ikonic to help develop the concept and make it a reality.

Analyze & Contextualize

My team used industry research and public health data to better understand people suffering from chronic pain and their needs. Most importantly, we wanted to uncover why Dr. Abaci’s patients were struggling to find reliable information regarding chronic pain online.

Using our research we created user personas and ran empathy mapping exercises to help focus our entire project around user needs.

Define

Brainstorming sessions allowed my team to rapidly ideate features and functionality that each persona would use on the platform. Publishing workflows, RSS feeds, flexible user permissions, and dozens of other features. Patterns began to emerge so we sorted our ideas into groups and prioritized each idea by how critical it was to the big picture.

Card sorting and cluster analysis helped outline the structure of the website and reveal four broad categories of pain information sought after by chronic pain sufferers and twenty focus topics. These efforts lead to a detailed specification document and broad action plan to drive design and development efforts forward.

Creative

Low-Fidelity

Budget restraints meant that I had to communicate layout and interaction through low-fidelity wireframes. Some key interactions were added to interactive wireframes to demonstrate critical features.

High-Fidelity

I created flat design concepts to communicate how our branding efforts would translate into a cohesive visual language on the website.

Identity Design

We utilized collaborative brainstorming sessions to find a name for the platform and create a brand story. Our top choice was voted down by other stakeholders and we were not given the opportunity to test with Dr. Abaci’s patients. I believe this was a mistake. I created dozens of iterations on the logo, slowly working toward the final version through dot voting with stakeholders. I created the final visual identity including the logo, color codes, typography, images, and usage guidelines.

Platform Development

Leveraging an open source content management system to save time and development costs, I chose a base theme and integrated Bootstrap, a mobile-first CSS, and Javascript framework. I developed custom publishing workflows and user interfaces to empower contributors to log into the platform and manage their own articles. I also collaborated with our developers to build a custom RSS feed parser to enable import of articles directly from our expert’s blog.

The intelligent platform tags trustworthy health articles daily and presents them to users in a beautiful, customizable dashboard. Additionally, an algorithm processes the most relevant articles based on user preferences. This personalized digital experience empowers consumers to take control of their health and pain.

Gaining Traction

Our largest effort after launch was to onboard contributors. In order for the platform to make an impact, we needed to recruit pain experts to bring their content to the service and leverage their social influence to create buzz. I used social media mining tools to identify respected and influential pain experts and my colleagues began the recruiting process.

In our outreach efforts, we discovered the most compelling feature for contributors was the automated RSS import. Pain experts overwhelmingly chose to participate without committing any time to publish their own content. This effort also exposed a gap in our initial user research. While we understood the needs of Dr. Abaci’s patients, we did not fully grasp the value of our contributors’ time and as a result, we put a lot of resources into building publishing workflows which are rarely used today.

Health Revolution Radio

Shortly after launch, Dr. Abaci landed an opportunity to produce a podcast, Health Revolution Radio. The resulting content would provide serialized audio content for Pain Relief Revolution which in turn would increase return visits and improve engagement. Again, I created wireframes for articles that would now contain audio. I updated our information architecture, and tree tested our designs to make sure users could easily navigate to and play a podcast. I also designed a content model and documented the administrative journey to help our content team add podcasts to the platform. The implementation was simple but effective.

Results

The platform has scaled to support heavy usage, and we have used user feedback and design sprints to continually optimize the user experience. We continued recruiting experts to the platform while making it easier for contributors to submit articles.

More than 5,000 members joined between 2014- 2016
Doubled the number of expert contributors – doctors and pain specialists
Content partnerships formed with about.com, Huffington Post, and WebMD
Thousands of people tune in to monthly programming and posts from Dr. Abaci

Pain Relief Revolution

A Place To Learn and Engage

Context

Challenge

Strategy

Content Strategy

Influencer Marketing

social

Creative

Platform Development

Results

Milestones

Pain Relief Revolution

Activities:

Technology:

Learning about pain treatments should be a highly positive and enriching experience. Pain Relief Revolution is working to make that a reality.

Activities:

Context

Challenge

Analyze & Contextualize

Define

Creative

Low-Fidelity

High-Fidelity

Identity Design

Platform Development

Gaining Traction

Health Revolution Radio

Results

Technology:

Say Hello

Or connect with me on the following platforms:

Pain Relief Revolution

A Place To Learn and Engage

Context

Challenge

Strategy

Content Strategy

Influencer Marketing

social

Creative

Platform Development

Results

Milestones

Pain Relief Revolution

Activities:

Technology:

Learning about pain treatments should be a highly positive and enriching experience. Pain Relief Revolution is working to make that a reality.

Activities:

Context

Challenge

Analyze & Contextualize

Define

Creative

Low-Fidelity

High-Fidelity

Identity Design

Platform Development

Gaining Traction

Health Revolution Radio

Results

Technology:

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