As a designer, the work that stays with you isn't always the most technically complex. It's the work where the stakes feel real. Life Takes Muscle was that project for me — a platform built for people with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a community advocating for their own care in a system that doesn't always make that easy. My job was to make that advocacy simpler, clearer, and more human.
My Role
Lead UX Designer
Agency
Precision AQ
Client
Scholar Rock
Launched
Q1 2024
Overview
Changing the conversation around SMA
Life Takes Muscle is a Scholar Rock–sponsored educational platform created to reframe how people living with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) — and the clinicians who treat them — think about muscle health. Existing SMA treatments primarily target motor neurons, but muscle atrophy often continues regardless. This site raised awareness of that unmet need while empowering patients to advocate for themselves in care settings.
Team
I worked within a tightly integrated multidisciplinary team, acting as the connective tissue between content, medical strategy, and development — translating clinical messaging into structured, user-centered layouts designed to survive MLR review intact.
A development team handled WordPress build and QA from annotated Figma specs. Scholar Rock's internal stakeholders and MLR reviewers were the client-side counterparts throughout.
My Contributions
End-to-end UX leadership
Information architecture
Structured five patient-facing pages and four HCP facing.pages with distinct hierarchy, in-page anchor navigation, and appropriate depth per audience.
Wireframing
Built desktop and mobile wireframes establishing layout logic, module sequencing, section anchor navigation, and CTA placement across every screen before visual design began.
Science communication design
Worked with the medical strategist to frame and layout the motor unit illustration and myostatin science section — translating complex neuromuscular biology into content accessible to patients with varying health literacy.
Pharma-compliant UX patterns
Designed exit interstitials, fair balance patterns, and audience-specific regulatory disclaimers — all established at the wireframe stage to streamline MLR review.
The USERS
Audience 01
Patients & caregivers
Needed empathetic language, emotional resonance, and concrete tools to advocate for muscle health in care settings.
Audience 02
Healthcare professionals
Needed clinical depth, scientific framing, myostatin research context, and unmet-need data with citations.
The goal was to design a single site that provided patients and healthcare professionals an experience tailored to their specific needs — instantly and without friction — while maintaining brand unity and operating within MLR constraints.
Beyond segmentation, the site needed to make a genuinely complex scientific concept — the muscle-motor neuron relationship — legible to a lay audience using illustrated diagrams, plain-language narrative, and real patient stories grounded in survey data.
Wireframes
Homepage.
The audience toggle sits top-right in the nav — a persistent Patients/Healthcare Professionals switch that carries through every page. Rather than forking the site into two separate URLs, this single control shifts content context in place.
The hero leads with a full-bleed patient image and jumbo campaign headline before any clinical language appears — a deliberate inversion of the standard pharma pattern.
Three section cards below act as a wayfinding layer, allowing users to navigate to the content most relevant to them without requiring them to read everything.
A patient quote from one of the featured patient's is followed by a link to their full story giving users incredible insight into life with SMA.
The sign up form is embedded at the bottom of the page to facilitate growing the Life Takes Muscle community from the very beginning of the web journey.
Muscle Matters.
Like the homepage, we lead with a patient image. This pattern will persist throughout.
The anchor nav bar was a structural decision made at the wireframe stage — not a visual flourish. Users arriving from search or HCP referral links often land mid-topic, so named anchors let them orient and jump without scrolling the full page.
The motor unit diagram is laid out as a two-column center spread (Motor Neurons on the left, Muscle on the right) making the conceptual gap between current treatments and muscle health spatially legible before a word is read.
The interactive Where Muscle Meets Life module tells you how many muscles the body must recruit to complete a given task, something that is easy to take for granted.
Strength Starts Here.
The sequencing of content on Strength Starts Here follows a deliberate emotional arc: practical and human-centered content leads, with science trailing as a payoff rather than a premise.
Physical therapy guidance and patient workarounds come first — grounding the page in lived experience and immediately useful information.
Only after the user has been met where they are does the myostatin science appear. This ordering was a conscious departure from the typical pharma pattern, which tends to front-load clinical rationale to establish credibility. Here, credibility is established through patient voice first. By the time a reader reaches Meet Myostatin, they've already been given reasons to care — which makes the science land as meaningful rather than abstract.
The transition into Everyday with SMA at the page footer reinforces the arc: science opens a door, community walks through it.
Everyday with SMA.
Designed as an organized content hub rather than a simple list. Each card carries a content-type label (Interview / Article / Video) enabling users to self-select by format before committing to a click.
The asymmetric card grid (3 across, then 2) reflects actual content volume rather than forcing a rigid layout — a pattern that scales as content is added over time.
The page closes with a full-width video module celebrating patient independence, shifting the emotional register from informational to aspirational.
Change the Conversation.
The self-advocacy guide is embedded mid-page alongside the care-team discussion prompts — not at the bottom as a standalone download. This placement was deliberate: the guide is most useful at the moment a patient is mentally preparing for a clinical conversation, not as an afterthought.
The Join Our Movement sign-up appears at the close, converting advocacy intent into community membership.
Design Decisions
What I'd call out specifically
Audience toggle, not a hard split
Rather than separate subdomains, I designed a persistent nav toggle (Patients / Healthcare Professionals) carried through every page header. This kept the brand intact while enabling two distinct user experiences — visible in every wireframe and a structurally important system to get right early.
In-page anchor navigation as a UX scaffold
Every long-form page featured a sticky section nav bar with named anchors. In a pharma context where users often arrive mid-topic from search or clinician referrals, orientation and jump navigation were critical — a pattern established in wireframes so it was baked in from the start.
Empathy before data
Standard pharma patterns lead with statistics. I structured the homepage and Muscle Matters pages to open with real patient voices before presenting survey data — a deliberate sequencing decision reflected in the wireframes: patient quote module precedes the clinical callouts.
Self-advocacy as an embedded tool, not aN AFTERTHOUGHT
The Self-Advocacy Guide PDF was placed directly alongside care-team discussion prompts — reinforcing its utility at the moment of intent rather than as an isolated download at the bottom of a page.
Outcomes
What the project achieved
In regulated pharma work, successful outcomes are about design that survives a rigorous review process, serves a vulnerable user base with clarity, and gives a brand a credible platform to grow from. This project delivered on all three.
Dual-audience SEGMENTATION
The audience toggle and entry modal successfully separated patient and HCP content tracks under a single domain — a non-trivial IA outcome for a regulated site with two meaningfully different disclosure requirements living side by side.
A community platform built to scale
The "Join Our Movement" sign-up flow — with segmented opt-in logic and Scholar Rock CRM integration — helped build a community of more than 2,000 people living with SMA, caring for someone with SMA, or following the science. The site launched with a live podcast series and downloadable advocacy tools already in place, giving Scholar Rock a meaningful owned channel from day one. Social media content tied to the platform generated millions of views, significantly raising awareness of SMA and the role of muscle in the condition.
Science communication that works for a lay audience
The motor unit illustration framework and myostatin explainer translated graduate-level neuromuscular biology into content accessible to patients with varying health literacy — developed collaboratively with the Precision AQ medical strategist and Scholar Rock's scientific team, without sacrificing clinical accuracy.
Reflection
What this project demonstrates
Life Takes Muscle sits at the intersection of my strongest skill sets: healthcare UX, pharma regulatory fluency, science communication design, and empathy-led storytelling. Designing for a community with a progressive, life-limiting condition — within an agency context that demanded close collaboration across copy, medical strategy, art direction, and development — required both rigor and warmth in equal measure. Working across copywriting, medical strategy, art direction, and development on a single project reflects the kind of cross-functional UX leadership I brought to Precision AQ, and the kind of work I do best.
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