Non-profit web community

  • Founding Product Designer & Infrastructure Lead – responsible for brand, UX/UI, design system, and the full platform stack (CMS, domains, emails, repositories, Zoom integration).

  • Start: December 2022
    End: Ongoing

  • Non‑profit, volunteer‑driven community for craniomaxillofacial surgeons, running since 2022 with very limited engineering resources.

    Core team is about 7 people.

  • Build a free, surgeon‑run education and events platform that feels simple, calm, and focused compared to typical noisy medical portals.

The challenge

Users and needs

Strategy and Approach

Organizational constraints: Tiny core team and no in‑house engineering; everything had to be maintainable by non‑technical volunteers.

Product challenge: Create an experience that is intuitive for busy surgeons, hides technical complexity, and can evolve as event formats and requirements change.

Technical challenge: Choose an off‑the‑shelf stack (CMS, Zoom, email + domains, lightweight repos) that still allows automation, analytics, and design‑system‑level consistency across marketing pages and event flows.

Primary users
Practicing surgeons and surgeons in training who want to keep up with global CMF best practices through live webinars and replays.

Key needs
Join events in a couple of clicks, across time zones and devices.
Trust the content and brand (by‑surgeons‑for‑surgeons).
Quickly understand upcoming schedule, topics, and speakers without cognitive overload.

Platform
Chose a CMS that balances speed, reliability, and ownership; set up domains, DNS, email, roles, and permissions so the team can run it without engineers.

Modeled content (events, series, speakers, resources, testimonials) and mapped it to CMS collections and Zoom events for reuse and automation.

Design
Built a reusable design system with color, type, spacing, and component tokens used in both Figma and CMS.

Designed for low‑friction focused events home, theme filters (cleft, orthognathic, TMJ, oncology, etc.), and simple, repeatable registration and follow‑up flows.

surgeON Brand Development

Discover

  • Audit of other webinar platforms and medical societies, highlighting that they feel noisy/corporate/too serious.

  • Defining brand tone and corporate identity.

  • Automated triggers for subscription receipts, member behaviour, contact segmentation.

  • Creating reporting and housekeeping structures on gdrive, clickup and notion.

  • Creating emails and how-to’s for the team.

surgeON Brand Development

Design

Core components:

  • Event cards (title, speaker, pathway, date).

  • Registration forms and confirmation flow.

  • Video library system with search and filters.

  • Certification workflow.

surgeON User Workflow
surgeON Design System

Deliver and iterate

  • Launched the full platform (CMS, event flows, registration, video library) and began onboarding the first cohort of surgeon members.

  • Worked closely with the founding team to implement the design system and train non‑technical volunteers on CMS workflows and content publishing.

  • Monitored analytics and event attendance patterns, then iterated on navigation (emphasizing upcoming events), added support for accredited events, podcast integration, and expanded filtering by clinical pathway.

  • Continuously refined email automations, member onboarding sequences, and confirmation flows based on user feedback and drop‑off data.

The process

Results

surgeON world map access visual infographics
surgeON world map access visual infographics

The platform has become a genuinely global hub for CMF education. In 2025, it reached 6,400+ unique visitors generating 18,500+ sessions from over 50 countries. Surgeons in India, Mexico, the United States, Egypt, Nigeria, and Brazil are among the most active users, demonstrating that the interface works reliably across different regions and connectivity levels.

Compared to 2024 (which had 14,676 unique visitors and 40,405 sessions), the 2025 platform attracted a more focused and engaged audience. While total session volume decreased, the platform successfully shifted toward a highly targeted CMF specialist community—proving that streamlined navigation, pathway-based content filtering, and improved event quality brought the right users to the platform and kept them engaged.

Next
Next

Product · Healthcare Platforms – Multi‑App UX Concepts