A website for an open science project with 20,000 volunteers

GCAT | Genomes for Life is an open science project led by the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute. For years it has followed a cohort of 20,000 people in Catalonia to study genes, environment and lifestyle at the same time, and so understand why chronic diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular disease or diabetes appear. Its data and samples, under FAIR principles, are available to the scientific community: more than 30 international projects and more than 70 publications have already come out of them.

The GCAT website had fallen behind: outdated design and user experience, no standard content management system, information that was hard to update and no space at all for the volunteers, who are the foundation of the project. Communication with participants ran through limited, scattered channels.

The brief had three audiences and three goals. For volunteers, a secure portal to update their details, check the questionnaires they had answered, manage their consent and receive notices of new surveys, with GDPR guarantees. For researchers, a clear scientific section with the projects, the publications and a simple procedure to request anonymised data. And for society, a website that explained what a project like GCAT is for. All in four months.

We started with conceptualisation: we analysed the website and its content, benchmarked scientific and biomedical websites and defined a new architecture around three questions, what GCAT is, what it contributes and how to take part in it, with content sheets and wireframes of the key pages validated with the team.

In design we created an interface that reflects the rigour of the study without losing warmth, with a style guide, a component library and mobile adaptations.

In development we built the platform on Drupal, in Catalan and Spanish, with two private areas: one for the 20,000 volunteers, managing their details, consents and notifications, and another for researchers, from which they request and track access to data and samples. All on an accessible, fast front end. We migrated the content worth keeping, with its redirects, and left the GCAT team trained to manage the website, the content and the volunteer area.

And in content we wrote the website's narrative: how the project is explained to a citizen, a volunteer and a researcher, the research project sheets and the testimonials of participants and team.