Angstforeningen - New Website & Visual Identity
Angstforeningen - New Website & Visual Identity
A UX-driven brand and website redesign for a Norwegian
non-profit organization supporting people living with anxiety.
A UX-driven brand and website redesign for a Norwegian non-profit organization supporting people living with anxiety.
Project Type
Client Project
Duration
Ongoing
Company
Thomashawk AS
My Role
UX Designer
Main Tools
Miro, Figma, WordPress
Project Type
Client Project
Duration
Ongoing
Company
Thomashawk AS
My Role
UX Designer
Main Tools
Miro, Figma, WordPress
About the client
About the client
Angstforeningen is a Norwegian non-profit organization supporting people living with anxiety and their relatives. It combines professional knowledge with lived experience, offering peer support, conversation groups, educational resources and guidance, without providing diagnoses or clinical treatment.
Approaching its 40th anniversary, Angstforeningen wanted to replace an outdated website and visual identity to celebrate the milestone, become more visible nationally and make it easier for people to find help.
My role
My role
I worked on the project during my UX design internship at Thomashawk AS, where I contributed to several client projects. For this project, I focused primarily on the research and ideation phases, which included planning and facilitating workshops, developing the research survey, organizing insights, brainstorming and collaborating with the client and the design team.
Alongside the project, I also developed an internal knowledge base on accessibility and universal design, which informed many of the considerations we brought into the research and design process.
“The website should give the impression of 'Now I've come home' - here I can finally get the information and support I need to learn more about my anxiety.”
— Anonymous research survey respondent (translated from Norwegian)
Process Highlights
Process Highlights
Research Principles
The challenge
The challenge
Designing for people living with anxiety requires a little bit different mindset than designing a typical website. Many users may experience reduced concentration, cognitive overload, stress while reading, difficulty making decisions and a greater need for reassurance and predictability. This means that accessibility is a must-have for this project.
At the same time, Angstforeningen wanted to:
Refresh its visual identity to feel more modern, relevant and nationally established
Strengthen national visibility while supporting local teams
Raise awareness and build trust
Recruit more members and volunteers
Balance professionalism with empathy
Accessibility first
Accessibility first
At the start of the research phase, my boss and i joined a DOGA workshop on designing for neurodivergence, held in collaboration with WIP Institute. Through shared experiences, presentations and exercises, I gained a lot of inspiration and a deeper understanding of how small design choices can make everyday life easier for people with different cognitive needs.
These insights informed our work with Angstforeningen and helped me expand company's internal knowledge base on accessibility, universal design and inclusive design practices.
Setting direction
Before beginning the research, we worked closely with Angstforeningen to clarify the project brief, organizational ambitions and expectations for the collaboration. Together, we defined the main audiences, project goals and the relationship between the national organization and its local chapters.
We also reviewed the existing website and visual identity, explored comparable organizations, and identified opportunities extending beyond a standard redesign, including stronger support for recruitment, local activity, content sharing and national visibility.
Working together
Working together
We began the insight phase with a collaborative workshop involving Angstforeningen's project group and associates. Alongside establishing trust and a shared way of working, we gathered their experiences, needs and ideas for the website, visual identity, content, imagery and local pages.
The workshop gave the people closest to the organization an active role in shaping the project from the beginning.
Listening to users
To broaden the research beyond the project group, I helped develop an anonymous survey for Angstforeningen's different audiences. The survey was hosted on Thomashawk website, therefore we made it in WordPress. It was a conversational form. This showed us how the organization was perceived, what people expected from the website and what they needed from its content, functionality and visual expression.
The survey provided the bigger picture, while a follow-up workshop and interviews helped us further explore the important themes, like accessibility, trust, local activity and national visibility.
Research synthesis
Research synthesis
I helped organize all the input collected from the workshops, survey responses, interviews and analysis (we used Miro). By grouping repeated observations, we identified themes such as…
These insights created a shared foundation for decisions about the website structure, content and refreshed identity as the project moved further into the … phase.
found the current identity and website dated or unclear
would prioritize self-help tools and access to human support
want the new experience to feel safe and welcoming
survey response rate (59 of 163 invited)
Current status: …
A foundation for design
The research phase gave the team a clearer foundation for the next stages of the project. It helped define:
The emotional qualities the experience should communicate
The balance between warmth and professionalism
Accessibility and cognitive-load considerations
Important content and user needs
Expectations for local and national pages
Principles for tone of voice and imagery
Opportunities related to membership, volunteering and participation
The work provided a shared reference point for later decisions about the website structure, visual identity and content.
This project was a wild ride - full of research, testing and experimenting! I tried the liquid glass style (mobile navigation) for the first time and played around with horizontal scrolling as well. My favorite part was working in Figma and testing the prototypes with real users!
What I learned:
Planning and managing afull end-to-end UX project
Building inclusive, community-oriented platforms
How to combine both qualitative and quantitative data
The great value of iterations and measurable testing
Reflection
Reflection
This project strengthened my understanding of how emotional context can influence every part of a user experience. Designing for people living with anxiety is not simply about choosing calm colours. It requires reducing uncertainty, supporting different levels of concentration, using language carefully and giving users greater control over how they engage with information.
I also learned how valuable stakeholder involvement can be when it is structured well. Workshops, surveys and interviews allowed us to move beyond internal assumptions and create a direction grounded in both lived experience and organizational needs.
Official launch planned for October 2026