Can a Well-Designed Website Save Lives?
When Mehek Malhotra, MSHFID ’25 learned a nonprofit supporting esophageal cancer patients in Africa needed help designing its website, she immediately volunteered to help.
A graduate student in Bentley’s Master’s in Human Factors in Information Design program, Malhotra felt a strong personal connection to the project. “My grandfather is an eye surgeon in India and runs a hospital providing free treatments to those in need,” she explains. “Having witnessed the effects of cancer firsthand — my grandmother is a breast cancer survivor, and I’ve lost family members to cancer — this particular cause is close to my heart. It seemed the perfect opportunity to apply my research and design skills in a meaningful way.”
This fall, she and three other Bentley students — Hong Anh (Emily) Nguyen, MSHFID ’26, Pooja Suresh, MSHFID ’26 and Preeti Vijayakumar, MSHFID ’25 — worked with the African Esophageal Cancer Consortium (AfrECC) to develop a compelling new website for the organization. “It’s one of the most fulfilling projects I’ve ever worked on,” Malhotra says, describing the experience as “an unforgettable journey of collaboration, learning and growth.”
A Chance Encounter Helps Solve a Problem
That journey was initiated by Mary Marcel, associate professor of Experience Design. Last year, Marcel attended an American Heart Association luncheon where her former student, Bentley alumna Chantrise Simms-Holliman ’96, was being honored. During the event, Marcel struck up a conversation with another guest at the table: AfrECC board member Dorene McCourt, who explained the nonprofit was looking for help developing its website. Marcel knew Bentley MSHFID students would be willing and eager to lend a hand.
Marcel enlisted colleague Roland Hübscher, associate professor of Experience Design, to identify students willing to volunteer their time and talents. Soon after, Malhotra and her peers joined Hübscher and spoke with two of AfrECC’s founders: Dr. Sandy Dawsey, a former senior investigator with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), and Dr. David Fleischer, professor emeritus at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine.
Dawsey and Fleischer explained that esophageal cancer is the sixth-leading cause of cancer death worldwide and is surprisingly common in Eastern Africa. Because access to healthcare is limited in the region, particularly in rural areas, more than 90% of patients present with advanced stages of the disease, characterized by severe esophageal obstruction. With few treatment options available, the prognosis is bleak. Most patients die within six months of diagnosis due to malnutrition and dehydration.
AfrECC was created in 2016 to improve patient outcomes through research, advocacy and clinical training. The nonprofit brings together more than 80 physicians and scientists working at 10 sites in nine countries to:
- Identify risk factors
- Develop early detection and treatment strategies
- Build Eastern Africa’s capacity to provide high quality, coordinated care
Despite esophageal cancer’s high mortality rate, the disease is chronically underfunded compared with other cancers that affect greater numbers of people worldwide. That’s why fundraising is a key part of AfrECC’s mission, its founders shared, and they needed their website to provide a clear and easy way for donors to contribute.
Working with AfrECC allowed me to bring empathy, strategy and design together to serve a meaningful cause, which is exactly why I chose this field in the first place.
From Insight to Impact: Designing for Patients and Donors
Feedback from Dawsey, Fleischer and other AfrECC stakeholders — including doctors in Africa providing direct care for patients — was “critical” to the design process, Nguyen says. “These conversations helped us quickly identify our core priorities: educating users about esophageal cancer, providing clear donation pathways and introducing the board members who lead the initiative. Working closely with stakeholders also ensured accuracy and sensitivity in how we presented medical information — using the right language and tone for both experts and a general audience. It was a strong reminder that empathy in design starts with deep listening.”
Communicating with AfrECC members also “helped us dig deeper into who we were designing for,” says Suresh. “With patients based mainly in eastern and southern Africa, it was really important for us to understand their context, needs and comfort with digital content.” The students devoted significant time to developing patient and donor personas. “For patients, we wanted to understand what kind of prior knowledge they might have — to determine if they were used to seeing health posters in clinics, or if visuals helped them better grasp medical information,” she explains. “That insight directly influenced our design choices. On our Esophageal Cancer page, for example, we wanted to avoid overwhelming readers with text, so we focused on clear, informative imagery to make the content more accessible and engaging.
“For donors, we focused on building trust and making the donation journey straightforward,” Suresh continues. “We wanted to ensure that the value and urgency of AfrECC’s mission came through clearly at every touchpoint. Altogether, these discussions helped us design with empathy and purpose, rooted in real-world understanding of the audience.”
Within a month of starting the project, the students delivered a thoughtfully designed and visually engaging website for AfrECC. Moving forward, Marcel shares, Bentley will continue to provide support. She notes that colleague Jason Zhou, assistant professor of Experience Design, is working with students in his Public Relations Writing (XD 255) course to create new content, including stories about esophageal cancer survivors and AfrECC care providers. And a student researcher with Bentley’s Center for Health and Business (CHB) will serve as the website’s administrator, working with AfrECC to update information as needed.
A Powerful Lesson in Purpose-Driven Design
Malhotra is grateful for the opportunity to apply her knowledge of User Experience (UX) principles to support cancer patients. “Working with AfrECC allowed me to bring empathy, strategy and design together to serve a meaningful cause, which is exactly why I chose this field in the first place,” she explains. “UX involves more than creating user-friendly interfaces; it’s about understanding people, their needs and their challenges — especially in contexts where resources are limited.
“Bentley’s MSHFID community is rooted in a strong value system that emphasizes human-centered design for social good, and projects like this reinforce that mission,” she continues. “Our professors help shape us into more thoughtful, responsible designers — ones who not only care about usability, but also about equity, access and ethical impact.”
Suresh agrees. “One of the main reasons I chose to pursue my master’s at Bentley was to explore the deeper side of design — the why behind what we do,” she says. “In our classes, we spend a lot of time understanding how humans make decisions, how cognitive load affects behavior, how bias creeps into systems. This project with AfrECC was my first opportunity to put that learning into action, to connect the dots between theory and lived experience.
“Projects like this help shift the mindset from ‘I made a usable app’ to ‘I helped someone understand their condition better’ or ‘I made it easier for someone to donate to a life-saving cause,’” she continues. “That kind of impact humbles you, but it also empowers you. It reminds you that design isn’t just what we do — it’s what we bring into the world. And that responsibility is something I want to keep carrying forward.”