Saskatchewan Cancer Agency

The Saskatchewan Cancer Agency (SCA) is responsible for providing leadership in health services, specifically serving patients, caregivers, medical professionals, and researchers across the province. To meet the diverse needs of these distinct audiences, the SCA engaged zu to reimagine its digital presence, moving beyond simple information hubs to create platforms grounded in clarity and comfort.

The SCA faced the complexity of managing a multi-site digital ecosystem within a complicated governance structure. They required a solution capable of serving distinct audiences, from patients seeking treatment information to internal staff requiring secure resources, without sacrificing a unified experience. Specific challenges included diverse user needs across patients, clinicians, researchers, and staff, complex governance managing content across multiple sites while maintaining consistency, and content overload where existing platforms suffered from deep click paths and excessive page content that hindered information accessibility.

zu partnered with the SCA to design and build a scalable Drupal multisite ecosystem using domain access. This architecture allowed the agency to maximize development resources by leveraging shared components across three interconnected websites, while still providing each site with its own content management environment for independent administration.

The engagement encompassed three key digital properties: SaskCancer.ca as the main public-facing website focused on patient accessibility and clarity, a Staff Intranet as a secure internal platform featuring Single Sign-On through Entra ID and Solr search to connect staff to their work and workplace, and Healthy Future Sask as a provincial preventive health and patient booking site.

The work began with strategy and discovery, interviewing stakeholders, engaging users, and pressure-testing structure through methods like card sorting and tree testing. A clear pattern emerged: the biggest friction wasn't visual. It was structural. People couldn't reliably find what they needed, and sensitive internal content demanded a more deliberate model for permissions, publishing, and accountability.

Rather than patching surfaces, the work centered on a foundation-first decision: unify the ecosystem on a shared Drupal platform that could support independent properties while reducing long-term complexity. This created space to design with consistency, reuse components where it made sense, and invest in the parts of the system that actually reduce friction: information architecture, content patterns, and governance.

On the intranet, security wasn't a feature request, it was a requirement for adoption. Enterprise single sign-on and role-based access were implemented so leadership content could be created, managed, and shared safely. Workflows and permissions were designed to match real editorial roles, preventing sensitive documents from being treated like generic files and ensuring the right people could access the right information without adding administrative burden.

Across the public website and research recruitment experience, the focus stayed on clarity and momentum: improved pathways to key content, scalable templates for ongoing publishing, and purpose-built components that make information easier to find and act on, like searchable stories, curated resources, and clear next steps.

The project was delivered on time and within budget, utilizing a shared component framework to accelerate development and strengthen content governance. The redesign resulted in significant improvements to the user experience, including a 40% reduction in overall page content streamlining the information architecture, a 25% increase in Call-to-Action visibility improving user engagement, and a 43% decrease in click depth making critical information easier to find.

The result is a more coherent, governed, and future-ready digital foundation, one designed to serve patients with clarity, staff with confidence, and research teams with stronger recruitment pathways, all while making the system easier to maintain as needs continue to grow.