The Client
Women Help Women (WHW) is an international nonprofit activist organization that works to expand knowledge and resources to support access to self-managed abortion and change the discourse around abortion and the culture of abortion provision. In 2017, WHW launched SASS (Self-managed Abortion; Safe and Supported) to support people in the United States who choose to have an abortion with pills outside of the healthcare system.
2024 Note: Now, after the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and subsequent state-by-state rollbacks of reproductive rights, the future of reproductive freedom is in question. We’ll see what SASS’ plans are, going forward.
The Challenge—2017
In 2017, a writer colleague approached me with some interesting and important work: promotional materials and a website for SASS. SASS’ organizer, a long-time reproductive rights activist, wanted physical materials to promote the SASS website, abortionpillinfo.org, to potential users and their supporters. She decided on stickers and flyers, which could be stuck or placed in bathrooms, clubs, locker rooms or anywhere the target audience might gather. The target audience was:
- Anyone who can get pregnant—cis women, trans men, non-binary people and others—and their friends and loved ones
- 18-34
- Likely people of color
- Likely lower income
- Likely online on their phones rather than a computer
She also needed a new SASS website for this demographic: mobile-first, eye-catching, easy to navigate, and informative without being preachy or condescending.
The Solution—2017
We started with the stickers and flyers. The writer wrote short, punchy headlines and subheads in English, and the organizer and I decided on a palette of bright pink and turquoise, for maximum visual impact and to appeal to the young demographic. I found a signature illustration for one set of designs: a group of young women of many races in bright clothing. I created text-only designs as well. The flyer had the same illustration but more text, this time using a teal picked up from the illustration. After the designs were approved, the text was translated into Spanish and I made new versions to fit.
For the website, I kept the bright pink and added a saturated gold and blue. I used large, flat areas of color for callouts and the sidebar (desktop) and footer (mobile). We put a “pregnancy calculator” on every page: the user selected the month and day of their last menstrual period, and the calculator returned how many weeks and days pregnant they were. A clickable, scrollable prototype is below (transparent circles show clickable links). Click here to see it full-size.
The Challenge—2021
The 2017 site, with its rectangles of vibrant pink, gold and blue, was popular with users. Research showed, however, that they were confused by how different it looked from the main WHW site with its hexagons (the shape of some abortion pills) and palette of greens and reds. The text was also outdated in some areas and needed a general refresh.
The Solution—2021
So we put the team back together! The organizer provided guidance; the writer completely rewrote the text with additional new material, and made it clearer and more internally consistent.
I started by changing the site’s color palette. While the WHW site used greens and reds, I decided that red, with its association with blood and danger, was less appropriate for a site about abortion. I therefore used the same light and dark greens as the WHW site, with red appearing only in secondary headers.
I also regularized the text format, added hexagon shapes and altered the signature illustration so that one figure’s gender presentation was more ambiguous, to make the designs more inclusive (see the flyers and stickers on the “Spread the Word” screen in the prototype). A scrollable, clickable prototype is below (transparent circles show clickable links). Click here to see it full-size.
The site is live now and has up to 4,000 unique visitors a month.