Our solution was to provide a better forum to demonstrate what makes them a world-leading cancer center. It’s the gifted, yet compassionate, people that work there. It’s the groundbreaking research. And most of all—it’s their commitment to treatment and care.

“Any time you get to work with an organization like Memorial Sloan-Kettering, it is a pretty special experience,” says John Caruso, Partner and Creative Director at MCD.  “We are happy to see the teams get recognition for their work and dedication, and are proud to have made a contribution to the amazing things that they do every day.”

The new site supports E*TRADE’s positioning as an online investing pioneer and details the full breadth and scope of E*TRADE’s product offerings. The design process, grounded in analysis and customer research, identified key insights which drove the development of the new E*TRADE.com. The result is a site intended to enhance the customer acquisition experience, elevate E*TRADE’s positioning and product offerings, segment different audience groups and deliver original content and educational material to inspire and educate both investors and traders.

“Our challenge was to extend E*TRADE’s dedication to supporting the self-directed investor to the other side of the login – before they sign up for an account,” says Ian Magnani, Partner at MCD. “With such an in-depth research component to this project, we were able to really build the site from the customer up. With the insights we’d gathered we were able to craft a genuinely helpful experience that is geared to the needs of investors of all levels of expertise.”

For more information about E*TRADE’s new website, visit etrade.com, or read E*TRADE’s press release.

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An interesting overall theme we noticed this year was the breaking down of boundaries. Specifically, we saw this in payments, mobile strategies, user interfaces, and brand marketing:

The evolution of mobile wallets: Mobile wallets had a lot of mindshare at SXSWi this year. Isis used a cyber-illusionist to showcase its mobile wallet platform (see video here). Jonathan Stark talked about how his crowd-funded Starbucks card experiment showed people can be not only generous to strangers but also perfectly willing to put money on and pay through a mobile app. More than a few speakers spoke about how mobile wallets will win over leather wallets when they offer value-add beyond payments. We definitely see a future where a mobile wallet will contain coupons, loyalty cards, customer service, security protection, and more — all in an extremely easy and secure user interface. We can’t wait.

Smarter multi-device strategies: When Apple first launched its App Store, the buzz was all about apps – it seemed like everyone, from entrepreneurial go-getters to big brands, needed a mobile app strategy. This year, we saw a shift in thinking: while mobile apps can work well for some experiences, it can’t be the answer for everyone. Responsive design is a smart way to create a design that dynamically detects device size and optimizes accordingly (re-size the browser while on the MCD home page to see a responsive design in action), while hybrid apps, such as Flipboard’s, are able to leverage the best of the web and the best of native apps through loosely-coupled APIs. As mobile usage continues to grow, it’s becoming even more important for brands to choose the mobile strategy that works best for them.

Invisible user interfaces: Amber Case documented the history of the human/computer interface in her keynote and pointed to a future where the machine becomes almost invisible. Ray Kurzweil also spoke about how humans and computers are becoming one and how, as technology becomes more advanced, it’ll enable us to improve our understanding of and interactions with not only our surroundings but also our genetics and biology. And Dennis Crowley spoke excitedly about his vision for Foursquare to become an all-knowing, always-on companion that provides recommendations and tips wherever you go. It was evident from these keynotes that user experiences will continually evolve to become ever more intelligent, invisible, and interesting.

Brands acting more like startups: Each year, a lot of hype surrounds which will be the next big startup emerging from SXSWi (after all, Foursquare, Twitter, and GroupMe all launched there). This year, it seemed like it was the bigger brands creating all the buzz. American Express’s Sync enables Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter users to easily pre-load offers to their card for seamless automatic savings later. Chevy, recognizing the desirability and different mindset of Millennials, crowd-sourced not only its Superbowl ad but also its car concepts. Samsung’s U.S. Olympic Genome Project will show anyone how they’re connected to Olympians. And marketers for large brands such as Dell, Disney, and Pepsi recognize the need to shift from waterfall to agile development.

We are excited and inspired by the innovation coming from all directions, and can’t wait to see what startups and brands alike come up with this year.

One tool to make sense of this complexity is responsive web design, an approach in which a web page and its content scales and adapts to the screen size of the device it’s viewed on – thereby creating customized experiences for each device type (tablets, smartphones, etc.) while eliminating the need for designing and maintaining multiple websites. Introduced in 2010, responsive design is still in its infancy, but its simplicity and efficiency has rapidly been embraced as a new standard.

“It is the elegance of the approach that excited me,” says Tom Simpson, Director of User Experience for MCD, “Responsive design finally gives companies the ability to publish once and have it appear properly for any device. The full website experience is available for all devices, instead of reducing the feature set of the mobile site to the bare minimum.”

At MCD, we’ve had great results putting content sites, like this one, into a responsive framework. The trick of it becomes anticipating the right content hierarchy based on the context. We’ve been solving this problem by including mobile use-cases into our thinking from the outset of a project, even if a “mobile site” isn’t explicitly stated as a requirement for the project. It is just becoming a natural part of the way we think about building sites.

A responsive website can be created with the proper blend of JavaScript and CSS allowing a site to be elastic – all part of our development toolkit. In order to make a design that works on a whole variety of screens sizes we need images and text that scale, margins that resize proportionally, items that wrap and reformat and even in some cases disappear. As the design shifts depending on the orientation of the selected device, one thing remains, the content is easy and pleasurable to consume and is appropriate for the kind of screen it’s being consumed on.

We’re currently working on a variety of responsive design projects for several of our clients and have a number more on deck. This site you are looking at (http://www.mcdpartners.com/) is built to be responsive. Change the window size and see!

Until now, determining the level and type of care required, as well as selecting appropriate providers for your loved ones had often been confusing and opaque. The new site, located at www.genworth.com/caregiving is part of a complete suite of service offerings dedicated to demystifying the Eldercare selection process and putting the caregiver in control of the situation.

Our Strategy, UX teams collaborated closely with the product managers to research the audience, establish product priorities, define functionality and establish marketing goals in an iterative manner. While, our design and copy teams established a distinctive, trustworthy brand voice that is so critical for success in this space.

A paid service with a “freemium” business model, the site includes a robust, filterable database that covers 5 major care types across the country, diagnostic tools to help people understand the options available to them, as well as educational content.

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Guided by a user-centered design approach we architected and designed a wholly new digital experience – a solution that ultimately spanned over 10,000 pages and addresses the needs of six very different audiences. The result was a more modern design and approach to support the truly amazing work they do each and every day

The world’s oldest and largest private cancer center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has devoted more than a century to patient care and innovative research, making significant contributions to the development of new and better therapies for the treatment of cancer.

See the Work

And pretty much as soon as the moving trucks pulled away, the catering and party trucks pulled in to set up our holiday party for clients and friends in Chicagoland.

The crowd of 50 plus christened the office with robust talks of digital strategy and design fueled by wine, Mojitos, and the turntable delights of DJ Roberto X—some of you may know him as Rob Graff, that guy that does your wireframes.

The next day as we went back to work and the morning sun filled our 4,500 square foot loft with light, we knew we were home. We’re pretty proud of our new residence and we invite you to stop by anytime to have a meeting or just hang out. You can find us at 314 W Superior, Suite 500. And the El stops right on the corner.

Hello Chicago. We’re glad to be here.

Working closely with the Samsung team, we used key learnings from focus groups, usability testing and brand research to drive a host of site improvements and design solutions that make the site a little smarter.

We created more opportunities to market products effectively, improved filtering tools to drive customers to products faster, and integrated the Samsung brand experience from the homepage down.

See what a beautiful thing insights can be. The new samsung.com.

A unified experience:
We united the ecommerce, blog, Nautica Ocean2Ocean, and social media experiences behind a common look and feel that honors the brand’s nautical spirit and passion for the water, but broadens the depth and connection to today’s upscale shopper.

Better merchandising:
Bolder, cleaner presentation of products, larger photographs and outfit inspiring cross-selling help the visitor connect more personally to the product and expand their shopping cart. Crisp ecommerce tools speed the consideration process and make it even easier to check out.

More reasons to connect and share:
Nautica’s passion for the water and connection to coastal lifestyle run deep and authentically into community-based social activities. From regattas to triathlons to ocean preservation, visitors are invited to experience the depth of the brand story right from the homepage. Products and design inspiration are seamlessly integrated and celebrated, linking the brand’s social efforts to its products.

Look for further enhancements to the site, including new experiences and shopping tools to launch over the course of 2012.

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“Agencies can be incredible hothouses for creativity and innovation, but in the end, our work is consumed by real people and made their own.” explains John Caruso, “Having the lab in-house enables us to try new things, more things, and get immediate feedback earlier and more frequently during the development process.”

The lab was designed to be a flexible space that can accommodate all types of audience research (from focus group discussions to one-on-one usability interviews) and is equipped with state-of-the-art recording and monitoring tools.

Having these tools on-site makes it easier to engage in both formal and ad-hoc testing throughout the creative and production process. Combined with robust quantitative online-research practices, we’re able to save time and cost without sacrificing reach.