UI Skins for Within3 Communities

Within3 creates online communities in the healthcare and life sciences marketplace. A Within3 community contains a private member base of healthcare professionals and allows them to collaborate, communicate and share information with each other. Sometimes a community is created for an existing medical association or centered around a disease state, drug or treatment.

A community is comprised of discussions, moderated spotlight or guided discussions, members, moderators, resources (photos, videos, files, etc.), and other forms of content.

In an effort to streamline and speed up the the design and development process for each community we implemented twitter's bootstrap front-end framework and created pre-set community user interface skins.

With some layout restrictions set in place, we tested a theory that a community's design could be 90% the same for each implementation. An unrestricted 10% of mostly custom CSS still allowed for custom changes in color palette (typography, buttons, text links, navigation), background patterns/textures, and typography (fonts) for H1 & H2 heading styles. In essence we were allowing each client's brand to take prominence within a pre-set skin while maintaining user experience and product consistency behind the scenes. Getting all of Within3's front-end development and design efforts narrowed down to a core framework could allow for huge efficiency gains in both the community design and implementation processes.

The mock-ups below show our initial "Swiss" skin and sample pages and layouts from our project effort. The brands, logos and content represented are for placement and mock-up purposes only.