Carosika Collaborative website and Taonga Tuku Iho Best Practice Guide

Client
Carosika Collaborative

Digital tools and development
Web design, UX and UI
Web development
Content and storytelling

Carosika Collaborative works across the pregnancy sector to achieve the best outcomes for all pēpi at risk of preterm birth or born preterm in Aotearoa with a specific focus on equity for all whānau. They needed:

• A website that would reflect the diversity of whānau in Aotearoa and support Carosika Collaborative’s mahi in education, promotion, advocacy, community engagement and research.
• A platform that would house Taonga Tuku Iho, a comprehensive best practice guide that provides health care providers with guideline recommendations, good practice points, tools and resources to support their implementation of best practice in preterm birth care.

It was essential that the Carosika Collaborative website should be as accessible to whānau as it is to health providers, and that the language and images used on the website should reflect the diversity of whānau in Aotearoa

The Taonga Tuku Iho best practice guide required a content system that would enable users to navigate a large amount of complex specialist information. As Taonga Tuku Iho is designed as a living document it was also essential that the Carosika Collaborative could easily review and update this resource.

For Purpose worked with members of the Carosika Collaborative to understand their needs for the website and best practice guide, and the needs of site users. The design process involved working closely with prenatal care specialists and people with lived experience in a series of workshops so that they had a chance to feed into the look and feel of the site.

Content design and storytelling

The site holds a large amount of information and acts as a resource for both whānau and healthcare providers. We created guidelines and templates that Carosika Collaborative members with expert knowledge could use to create user-centred content. This included creating a lived experience storytelling  guide for working with whānau to create whānau stories. 

Members of the Carosika Collaborative - in consultation with Māori and members of the Rainbow Community - developed inclusive language guidelines to ensure that the website and best practice guide upheld the kaupapa to support equitable change. As a result, care was taken to ensure that the site uses positive framing and inclusive language that acknowledges diversity and difference, and promotes inclusion and participation. Whānau represented on the site also reflect these principles.

Web design, UX and UI

• The original brand concept was created by Opeta Elika, which we adapted to the digital environment.
• We included organic wavy lines, soft corners and colour gradients to soften the site and make it feel less like a western medical environment and more inviting to the key target audiences.
• The site needed to serve two very different audiences: whānau and healthcare providers. To achieve this we created clear user pathways designed to meet their different needs. The sections for whānau are story-led and host lots of images of people and lived experience. The sections for healthcare professionals are clean and efficient. For the medical best practice guide we designed a content system that enables users to navigate hundreds of pages of dense specialist information.
  

Web development

The Taonga Tuku Iho best practice guide required turning a large volume of information into a user-friendly searchable wiki.

Key features of this solution include:

• Custom styling across the content that can be enhanced with images and other media such as downloadable files.
• The ability to organise content into chapters and subchapters with anchor links to specific content.
• Pages can be printed or downloaded.
• Updates can be made easily, making this a ‘living document’.
• Information is searchable and easy to use.

See a sample chapter of Taonga Tuku Iho here.

Whānau stories: kōrero from whānau in the Carosika community who share their experiences of preterm birth.

Guides for whānau on how to reduce the risk of preterm birth and what to expect if they are navigating preterm birth.

Information about equity and preterm birth, and resources for Māori, Pacific and Indian whānau, who are more likely to experience preterm birth than other ethnic population groups in Aotearoa.

Care has been taken to use inclusive language and imagery throughout the site to reflect the diversity of whānau in Aotearoa and the principle of achieving equity in a culturally responsive way.