Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) partnered with us to migrate their aging, PHP-based content management system to a modern custom-built platform. The new solution needed to support hundreds of sub-sites operated by hundreds of non-technical administrators working in health centers around the nation. The platform needed to be highly accessible and perform well on low-powered devices, easily extended by the organization’s developers, and reliable enough to power dozens of custom advocacy, healthcare, and search-centric applications.

We began the five-year-long project with a thorough requirements-gathering process. We audited the existing system, met with healthcare providers and lead stakeholders, and evaluated the new designs. Through close collaboration with PPFA, we shaped a technical strategy that resulted in a successful launch within 16 months.

We were responsible for architecting the platform from top-to-bottom. We cleansed and migrated legacy data to the new system. We built a robust design system consisting of 80+ unique components that sped up the development of new user interfaces. Each component and its parent site were highly themeable. We built a performant, location-oriented health center search that helped hundreds of thousands of people across the country receive care. With that knowledge, we would go on to co-design and implement an experimental appointment scheduling application that improved healthcare access.

The platform was backed by powerful administrative tools. In addition to highly flexible content management capabilities, it featured component-level permissions, tools for importing and exporting large sets of data, and advanced systems for building out detailed information architectures. From the start, the excellent usability of the administrative system was a key requirement. We worked closely with stakeholders across the organization to ensure that the processes and user interfaces for administrative were frustration-free.

The new PPFA platform would go on to be built upon and evolved. After several years of rapid development, we moved into a technical lead role to guide and train PPFA developers so that they could assume full responsibility for the platform.