Duration
3 Months
Client
Jane, Shaelyn, Harleen, Junhao
Tools
Figma, Figjam, UX Metrics
Role
#
UX Design
#
UX Research
Project Overview
The Student Medical Ethics Journal is a nonprofit, student-run academic journal with a rare ambition: to democratize medical ethics discourse across students, practitioners, and educators worldwide. They publish peer-reviewed articles, video seminars, and multimedia content — and they’d been growing.
But something wasn’t working. Users who arrived rarely stayed. Submissions were declining. And the site’s structure was quietly buckling under the weight of new content formats it was never designed to absorb.
When SMEJ came to our team, their brief was clear on the surface: rethink the information architecture, improve discoverability, and design a system scalable enough to grow with them for years. What we found underneath was more interesting — the site had been organized around how editors think, not how readers arrive.
Our Solution
The final design covered six complete flows, but in this case study I'll highlight the 3 most important ones:
1. Perspective Map
Introduced Perspective Map as an interactive exploration tool that helps users discover connections across topics & perspectives.
Featured on homepage to highlight a new exploratory way to browse the journal!
Features:
Interactive Topic Bubbles
“Explore Topic -->” CTA
Map vs List Toggle View
2. Search
A search bar was introduced to allow users to quickly find content by topic, keyword, or interest.
Features:
Filter (Topic, Publication Type, Issue, Author)
Recent Searches
Article Preview
Metadata-driven labels
3. Issue Exploration
Designed to better highlight the SMEJ’s issues while reducing the overwhelming browsing experience present in the current site.
Features:
Restructured Issue / Article Organization
Filter (Topic, Publication Type, Author)
Metadata-Driven Labels
Download & Share Issue Feature
The Problem
Users land with one purpose. They rarely find it & almost never discover anything new.
SMEJ came in with five goals: improve reader retention, boost SEO and discoverability, clarify the site structure, streamline contributions, and build a multimedia framework that wouldn’t collapse under the weight of podcasts and video seminars.
These weren’t five separate problems. They were symptoms of a single root cause: the site was organized around SMEJ’s internal taxonomy, not how readers actually think and browse.
What I Learned.
The most durable lesson from this project is that organizational logic and user logic are almost never the same thing. SMEJ’s site wasn’t broken because of bad intentions, it was built by people close to the content, organized around categories that felt natural from the inside. The problem only became visible once we stood outside it.
That’s the practical argument for user research: not that the people building things are wrong, but that proximity creates blind spots. The participant who paused on ‘Issues’ wasn’t confused because they were unsophisticated, they were confused because the label was doing the wrong job.
The Perspective Map was the decision we’re most proud of because it came directly from listening. Academic readers navigate by ethical framework first, topic second. That’s not an assumption. It’s something people told us.