Website Redesign San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium
The San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium (SABCS) is the largest and most prestigious breast cancer research meeting in the world. Every year, researchers, physicians, patient advocates, students, and industry professionals from around the globe come together to network, learn, and advance breast cancer prevention and treatment.
We partnered with SABCS to transform their website into a modern, accessible, and community-oriented digital experience that would serve attendees before, during, and after the event. The new site saw double the number of page views year over year leading up to the annual conference.
Defining Key Tasks with Real Users
To kick off the project, Aten’s UX Strategist attended the symposium to chat with attendees about their pain points with the website and test a navigation prototype to validate the sitemap.
We learned that users struggled with registration, booking hotels, and navigating the 600-page event program PDF. We also learned that the website was not only serving an annual event - it was a vital communication channel for an active, year-round community.
We distilled our findings from the discovery phase of the redesign, and developed a task-based information architecture that supports the full lifecycle of engagement: helping users register, attend, and stay connected after the event.
A Design System Inspired by the Symposium and its Attendees
With design, our first objective was to keep the user on task: to register, find event information, and apply for presentation opportunities. We created clear and distinct calls to action in the site’s navigation and on the homepage.
We loosely relied on SABCS’s existing brand and prior conference collateral to create a refreshed, bold design language to give the site a stronger look and appeal to younger audiences. Finally, we leveraged SABCS’s high-quality event photography to immerse the user into the event and tell its story with real people and action.
Conference Program Improvements for Content Managers and Users
The heart of the new WordPress site is a completely reimagined event management system.
Previously, SABCS’s event program existed only as a massive PDF—unsearchable, static, and inaccessible. We replaced it with a robust, fully searchable, and accessible event calendar, custom-built for flexibility and automation.
Event Calendar Plugin
We built a custom WordPress plugin that filters upcoming and past events by presenter, time, session type, and session category. It includes complex time logic, Google Calendar and iCalendar integrations, and dynamic tagging.
Event Importer
To streamline content management, we built a custom importer that connects directly to SABCS’s scheduling software. The importer automatically syncs new speakers, sessions, and abstracts—mapping the software’s existing tags and categories into WordPress. The SABCS content team can run the importer weekly to pull in new records automatically, saving countless hours of manual entry.
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