Case Study • Pharma / Healthcare UX
As a designer, the work that stays with you isn't always the most technically complex. It's the work where the stakes feel real. Life Takes Muscle was that project for me — a platform built for people with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a community advocating for their own care in a system that doesn't always make that easy. My job was to make that advocacy simpler, clearer, and more human.
My Role
Lead UX Designer
Agency
Precision AQ
Client
Scholar Rock
Launched
Q1 2024
my contributions
User Research
Information Architecture
Wireframing
prototyping
Design System
QA & Launch
GOAL: Changing the conversation around SMA
Life Takes Muscle is a Scholar Rock–sponsored educational platform created to reframe how people living with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) — and the clinicians who treat them — think about muscle health. Existing SMA treatments primarily target motor neurons, but muscle atrophy often continues regardless. The goal was to close that gap by raising awareness of the unmet need, building a community around it, and creating a platform with the reach and credibility to drive real change.
SOLUTION: A PLATFORM WITH REAL REACH
Building the Community
Pharma platforms are typically built to inform and exit. We wanted to build something people would return to — and bring others to. The SMA community is tight-knit, vocal, and underserved by the kind of content that actually reflects their lives. If we could meet them there — with real stories, accessible design, and a genuine invitation to join something — we believed they would show up. The Join Our Movement sign-up, the patient stories, the social campaign weren't features. They were a bet that a pharma brand could earn a community rather than just reach one.
Advancing the Conversation
HCPs are bombarded with clinical data. What they rarely get is perspective — the texture of what their patients experience between appointments. We wanted to create a format that closed that gap without feeling like continuing medical education. A podcast hosted by a clinician, for clinicians, but anchored in patient and caregiver voices. The hypothesis was that if we made it feel like a conversation rather than a presentation, HCPs would lean in rather than tune out. That hypothesis won a Fierce Pharma Award.
Bringing it All Together
Most pharma campaigns treat web, social, and content as separate workstreams with separate briefs. We wanted to design them as a single system from the start — one message, built to travel. The site anchors it. The podcast deepens it. The social content spreads it. Each channel feeds the others, and the community that grows around it amplifies everything. That's not a campaign. That's a platform.
Impact: THE CONVERSATION IS GROWING
The numbers tell the story. A community of over 4,000 people built around a shared belief that muscle matters. Millions of social media views that put SMA in front of audiences who had never heard of it. And a podcast series that earned a Fierce Pharma Award — recognition that a pharma brand can create content people actually want to listen to.
The Join Our Movement sign-up — with segmented opt-in logic and CRM integration — helped build a community of more than 4,000 people across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram living with SMA, caring for someone, or following the science.
Social content tied to the platform generated millions of views across channels, significantly raising awareness of SMA and the role of muscle in the condition.
The Life Takes Muscle podcast won a Fierce Pharma Award in 2025 — recognition of the platform's broader omnichannel impact and the quality of its clinical storytelling.
How We Did It
User Research
Patients
Survey data from the Cure SMA Community revealed that despite the transformative impact of SMN-targeted therapies, muscle weakness, fatigue, and loss of independence remain the community’s most pressing unmet needs. Across multiple years of data, adults with SMA consistently ranked gaining muscle strength, reducing fatigue, and achieving new motor function as their top priorities.
These unmet needs span a wide age range, informing the decision to represent patients across ages — Bear at 10, Mckenna at 16, Lyza at 23 — rather than narrowing to a single demographic.
Caregivers
Research consistently shows that caregivers of people with SMA carry a significant and often invisible burden — reduced quality of life, high levels of distress, and unmet needs around information access, care coordination, and financial support. A swing weighting study of caregivers found that treatment access and cost coverage ranked alongside clinical outcomes as primary concerns, pointing to a community navigating systemic barriers on top of the disease itself.
This shaped two key design decisions: caregivers were treated as a co-equal audience on the patient site, not a secondary one. The sign-up form’s segmented opt-in logic (patients / caregivers / family members / other) was designed to acknowledge distinct roles rather than collapsing everyone into a single patient bucket.
Healthcare Professionals
Research identified a persistent gap between what HCPs know clinically and what they understand experientially about their patients’ lives. A Cure SMA working group found that HCPs agreed patient and family perspective should be an essential consideration in treatment decisions — yet the tools to facilitate that understanding were largely absent. Key knowledge gaps included variability in treatment response, the growing complexity of adult SMA, and limited validated biomarkers.
This directly informed the HCP site’s content sequencing: patient voices and lived experience appear before clinical data, not after. The podcast series was designed as the primary vehicle for this — conversations between clinicians, patients, and caregivers that create contextual understanding a data table cannot.
The Takeaway
The research pointed in one direction: two audiences with fundamentally different needs, connected by a single unmet truth — muscle matters, and nobody was talking about it.
Audience 01
Patients & Caregivers
Empathy first. Tools to advocate. An experience accessible to everyone — including the many people with SMA who rely on screen readers and assistive technology.
Audience 02
Healthcare Professionals
Not education. Perspective. A platform that closed the gap between what clinicians know clinically and what they understand about their patients' lives.
Design decisions: Four Pillars that shaped everything
One Site, One Conversation
The original vision was one site — no gate, patients and clinicians side by side. That idea made it into the initial wireframes before audience complexity forced a pivot. But the instinct never went away. The shared brand, the sense that both audiences belong to the same conversation — all of it traces back to that original thinking.
Empathy Before Data
Standard pharma content patterns lead with statistics. We inverted that deliberately. On every page — homepage, Muscle Matters, the HCP track — patient voices and lived experience appear before clinical data. The reasoning was simple: people need to feel understood before they're ready to be informed. For patients, that meant validation first. For clinicians, it meant perspective before evidence. The data lands harder when there's a human being behind it.
Accessibility as a Foundation
Accessibility wasn't a compliance checkbox — it was a core design constraint from the first wireframe. Many people living with SMA rely on screen readers, switch controls, and other assistive technologies. Designing for that reality from the start meant semantic structure, proper contrast ratios, and interaction patterns that don't assume a mouse or full motor control. It also meant the site had to work for caregivers navigating on behalf of someone else, often under stress.
Beyond the Browser
The web experience was never designed in isolation. From early in the process it was clear that the podcast, the social content, and the site were parts of the same system — one message, multiple touchpoints. That meant designing the web platform to anchor the broader ecosystem: the sign-up form feeds the community, the community amplifies the social content, the social content drives people back to the site. The 4,000+ community members and millions of social views weren't a happy accident. They were the plan.
Wireframes: Patients & Caregivers site
Homepage.
A persistent Patients/HCP toggle sits top-right in the utility nav. Rather than splitting the site into two separate destinations, this single control keeps both audiences under one roof, shifting perspective without breaking the sense of a shared community
The hero leads with a full-bleed patient image and jumbo campaign headline before any clinical language appears — a deliberate inversion of the standard pharma pattern.
Three section cards below act as a wayfinding layer, allowing users to navigate to the content most relevant to them without requiring them to read everything.
A featured patient quote links directly to their full story — an unfiltered window into life with SMA.
The sign up form is embedded at the bottom of the page building the Life Takes Muscle community from the very first visit.
Muscle Matters.
A patient image leads the page reinforcing the sitewide commitment to centering human experience before clinical content.
The anchor nav bar was a structural decision made at the wireframe stage not a visual flourish. Users arriving from search or HCP referral links often land mid-topic, so named anchors let them orient and jump without scrolling the full page.
The motor unit diagram is laid out as a two-column center spread (Motor Neurons on the left, Muscle on the right) making the conceptual gap between current treatments and muscle health spatially legible before a word is read.
An interactive module reveals how many muscles the body recruits to complete everyday tasks like tying, typing, and standing up from a chair. Things most of us never think twice about. For someone with SMA, nothing is taken for granted.
Strength Starts Here.
The sequencing of content on Strength Starts Here follows a deliberate emotional arc: practical and human-centered content leads, with science trailing as a payoff rather than a premise.
Physical therapy guidance and patient workarounds come first, grounding the page in lived experience and immediately useful information.
Only after the user has been met where they are does the myostatin science appear. This ordering was a conscious departure from the typical pharma pattern, which tends to front-load clinical rationale to establish credibility. Here, credibility is established through patient voice first. By the time a reader reaches Meet Myostatin, they've already been given reasons to care which makes the science land as meaningful rather than abstract.
The transition into Everyday with SMA at the page footer reinforces the arc: science opens a door, community walks through it.
Everyday with SMA.
Designed as an organized content hub rather than a simple list. Each card carries a content-type label (Interview / Article / Video) enabling users to self-select by format before committing to a click.
The asymmetric card grid (3 across, then 2) reflects actual content volume rather than forcing a rigid layout — a pattern that scales as content is added over time.
The page closes with a full-width video module celebrating patient independence, shifting the emotional register from informational to aspirational.
Change the Conversation.
The self-advocacy guide is embedded mid-page alongside the care-team discussion prompts not at the bottom as a standalone download. This placement was deliberate: the guide is most useful at the moment a patient is mentally preparing for a clinical conversation, not as an afterthought.
The Join Our Movement sign-up appears at the close, converting advocacy intent into community membership.
reflection
Life Takes Muscle sits at the intersection of my strongest skill sets: healthcare UX, pharma regulatory fluency, and empathy-led storytelling. Designing for a community with a progressive, life-limiting condition demanded both rigor and warmth in equal measure — and doing it within a cross-functional agency team across copy, medical strategy, art direction, and development is exactly the kind of leadership I do best.
Pharma UX doesn't have to feel like pharma. This project proved it.
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