Case Study /
DID AWARENESS
WEBSITE
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is a trauma based disorder that forms in childhood, leaving the person’s mind fragmented into seemingly different individuals, which are named alters. It comes with memory loss between alters, making life harder to navigate and often creating frustration from lack of understanding of their own lives. Its misrepresentation in media, which has mainly used the condition within violent storylines, has led to people living with DID struggling to obtain help, as they are judged and feared instead of being met with compassion.

The mandate was to create a website to raise awareness on what DID is, how it affects individuals, how the disorder is perceived socially and how to help. For this project, I knew that being careful with the subject matter was extremely important. After a lot of research, I came to the conclusion that the experience of people living with DID could be represented to some degree visually. I hoped to convey the difficulties through visual metaphors and a sense of narrative in the way the site is built.
Mockup of a phone on mirrors.
Mockup of a laptop on mirrors.
I wanted to divide the site into different personalities, hoping to capture the individuality that can be found within a system (term used to refer to all alters in one body as a collective). Named after alters I’ve had a chance to meet throughout my life, these pages embody different roles that someone might have as a way to help, or to cope, for the collective.
In the same spirit, the buttons have the text “change perspective” written on all of them. I chose this phrasing for its double meaning. It is a call for people who already hold preconceived ideas on the disorder to reconsider their views. It also implies a switch between identities is happening, changing the way the system perceives the world and interacts with it.
The end of the website, in which I list symptoms that DID can bring with itself, is my favourite part. I found that the condition makes daily life considerably harder for the people living with it, as symptoms such as memory loss, blurred sense of identity and medical issues it brings, are something that affects them extremely often. It’s hard for them to ignore all of it, and so viewers of the site shouldn’t be allowed to ignore it either. The button becomes more and more present as users are faced with this uncomfortable truth, urging them to hide from it, in a way similar to why systems switch between alters.
Layout with three mobile pages.
Make it bigger. make it loud!
Interactive element.