Rare Dementia Support
A long-running relationship with a charity supporting people living with or affected by rare dementias, first through Selfridges and then independently.
- Year
- Ongoing
- Focus
- Charity, Accessibility, Design systems
Rare Dementia Support helps people living with or affected by rare dementias, along with the families, carers and clinicians around them.
It began through the Selfridges Charity Programme. RDS was one of the organisations picked for pro bono design support, and I took it on with the in-house UX and design team at Selfridges. That first phase was mostly about making the site do its job. We redesigned the key pages so the content was easier to take in, restructured the site so people could find the information, the events or the support group that applied to them without needing to know the vocabulary first, and treated accessibility as a starting condition rather than a check at the end, working to WCAG and designing specifically for neurodivergent users. Somebody had to build it, so I recruited a front-end developer and worked with them to get a functioning front end delivered.
The reason accessibility isn't a box-tick on a site like this is worth saying plainly. The person reading a page may have been diagnosed a fortnight ago. They might be a carer at eleven at night, after a long day. Making them work for it is a design failure with consequences attached.
When the programme ended I carried on independently, and that's the part I'm gladdest about. Since then there's been a second full-site refresh, aimed at simplifying navigation and keeping things findable as the library of content grew, a proper rework of the information architecture around support pathways, research materials and community events, and a design system and component library so the team can make changes themselves without the whole thing drifting out of shape.
That last piece has probably mattered most. I've spent a fair amount of time coaching their internal team, and a small organisation that can make sound design decisions on its own is worth more than any single redesign I could hand over.
It's the longest-running relationship on this list, and I'm still working with them. I don't think I need to explain why I've kept it going.