2023Lien Collaborative for Palliative Care Website Experience + Design Lead Giving palliative care a voice for the people who spread it
The organisation needed a web presence that could match the clarity and scale of its mission, while serving three very different audiences through a single front door: healthcare leaders weighing whether to adopt palliative care in their countries, clinicians and academics who might join as volunteer faculty, and donors seeking evidence of impact.
Lien Collaborative for Palliative Care trains healthcare workers across developing Asian countries to start and scale palliative care services — work that now spans 10 countries, 139 institutions, and over 450 trained practitioners.
The homepage opens with a narrative guided by an orange sphere — Lien's corporate colour — that the user sets in motion by scrolling. Lien-as-catalyst: the brand identity becomes a narrative character that moves through the palliative care landscape, touching and transforming what it encounters.
As the visitor scrolls, the ball carries, shapes, opens, and spreads across the screen, moving through visual sequences that correspond to Lien Collab's four pillars of work: holistic care, training local practitioners, improving access to pain medications, and supporting clinical fellowships overseas. The organisation's mission is enacted visually — through the visitor's own gesture to swipe/scroll — before any copy contextualises it. We made scrolling become an act of participation. It's a statement about the collaborative model the organisation was built on.
Content architecture as design
We conducted a page-by-page content audit of the existing site, then distilled and restructured all of Lien Collab's content into a narrative architecture that the design could carry. Country pages, previously collapsed into a single chronological overview with inconsistent depth, were restructured into individually accessible pages with consistent structure: overview, milestones, impact, and faculty leads. An academic comparing programmes across regions can navigate between them.
We then set the content architecture and distilled all source material into the site's narrative structure. In Plain Words refined copy for succinctness and cross-cultural accessibility.
Designed to grow
The site now accommodates twelve country programmes — including recent additions such as Thailand, Nepal, and the Philippines — without breaking the narrative architecture. Updates, news, and country-level content are maintained by Lien and APHN's team directly, built to sustain the communication platform beyond the design engagement.
