The situation
What we were solving Women newly diagnosed with breast cancer faced authoritative content organized for clinicians, not for how they searched and acted under stress. In an in24 sprint with a real patient in the room, we built an ecosystem framework — device, moment, voice, and decision — that Cancer Care Ontario used to reorganize the work that followed.
A patient gets a diagnosis. The internet hands her a brick.
Ania is 38. Three kids, suburb of Toronto. She has just been told she has breast cancer. In the next 72 hours she will absorb more clinical information than she has in the previous decade — most of it written for clinicians, organized by treatment stage, and accessed through search results that surface the loudest content rather than the most reliable.
Cancer Care Ontario already had the authoritative content. The problem was not what to say; the problem was that the patient’s actual experience of finding, reading, and acting on it was hostile. The medical system was optimized for the disease. The patient needed it optimized around her relationship with the disease.
Evidence
A three-and-a-half-minute film of the workshop, the patient, and the team.
Filmed in our Toronto studio during the in24 session. The patient speaking is a Cancer Care Ontario research participant. The hero above is a frame from the workshop film — click to play.
3:26 · WeCare user journeys, Cancer Care Ontario
“What we’re mapping here is a trajectory of a relationship between an audience and a brand.”
Approach
A single day, one cross-disciplinary room, and a working answer by close.
We ran the engagement as an in24 — the design-sprint format I led at Wipro Digital. Cross-disciplinary team, a real patient in the room, and a shipped artifact at the end of the day. Not a deck.
The artifact was an ecosystem framework: which information lives on which device, at which moment of the patient journey, in which voice, supporting which decision. The framework was what Cancer Care Ontario used to organize the work that followed.
The five decisions
These are the calls I made, and why.
Anchor on Ania, not on “the breast cancer patient.”
The clinical organization defaulted to disease-stage framing: pre-diagnosis, diagnosis, treatment, survivorship. That framing collapses a patient into her tumor.
I argued for a single, specific persona — a real woman with a name, an age, a job, three kids, and a fear of leaving them. Every screen, every word, every information hierarchy got tested against Ania. If a decision didn’t make sense for her at that moment of her life, it was wrong, regardless of clinical correctness.
Map the relationship, not the funnel.
A patient’s relationship with breast cancer outlasts any single visit, treatment, or web session. A funnel model assumes she shows up, converts, leaves. A relationship model assumes she comes back changed, at unpredictable intervals, with different questions each time.
We built the journey as a multi-year arc, not as a sales tunnel. That shifted the information architecture from “here is everything we know” to “here is what you need at this moment, and we will be here when the next moment arrives.”
Right information, right device, right moment.
A single channel cannot carry the load. The phone in the doctor’s office is for the question Ania couldn’t bring herself to ask out loud. The laptop at home is for the long read on her specific subtype. The printout is for the conversation with her sister.
We mapped content type to device to moment. Audio, video, text, interactive components — each one carrying the weight it was designed for. The decision wasn’t which channel to choose. It was how the channels handed off to each other across a long-arc journey.
Workshop with the audience, not at the audience.
Standard practice would have been to design the framework, then test it in a focus group two months later. We brought real patients into the in24 itself, ran ideation against their reactions in real time, and revised the model in the same room where it was built.
This is not a participatory-design slogan. At these stakes, the cost of designing for the wrong person — or the right person at the wrong moment — was unacceptable. The room had to include the person we were designing for.
Two firms, one room, no hierarchy.
Wipro Digital led design and strategy. Key Lime Interactive led research and synthesis. The conventional pattern is research-then-design as a baton handoff. We refused that.
Research and design ran as peers in the same room from day one. Decisions were jointly owned. The team had to be able to defend each call on both design and research grounds before it was kept. That is the structure I always default to when the work involves clinical content or any subject where being wrong has real costs.
Outcome
The framework Cancer Care Ontario used to organize the work that came after.
What we shipped at the end of in24 was a working ecosystem framework — content surfaces, device assignments, voice guidelines, journey-stage handoffs — not a final product. That framework became the organizing structure for Cancer Care Ontario’s patient-facing information work that followed.
For the team, the more durable result was the in24 model itself: an engagement format clients trusted, because it produced shipped artifacts in days instead of weeks of consulting theatre. The Hartford ran the same format with us a year later (filmed; see The Hartford case study). The two engagements together are why I still default to this format whenever a problem is high-stakes, high-ambiguity, and short on time.
Why this work matters here
The patterns transfer.
A person facing a hard, complex life situation. Multiple stakeholders — clinical, coach, employer, family, self — each one wanting a different surface of the same truth. Information that has to meet her where she is, when she needs it, in the form she can absorb. The shipped artifact has to honor all of those constraints at once.
The decision framework above — anchor on a person, map the relationship, distribute the information, vet with the audience, partner with research as equals — is the framework I bring to any product where the user is in a hard moment of their life and the design has to be honest with them about it.