Rebuilding a biotech's investor hub around two opposite readers.

CorMedix was about to become a commercial company. DefenCath, its first product, was in front of the FDA. For a single product biotech, that filing is the whole story, and every external audience comes to the site to read it.

The site was more than ten years old. It turned critical tasks into trial and error and made a company on the edge of approval look static. Two failures stood out. Investors needed too many clicks to reach reports, filings, and the financials behind a buy or sell decision. Journalists and the scientific community had to dig for clinical evidence and press kits, often landing on the official source by way of Google.

The job was to widen access and transparency without breaking compliance, and keep the result manageable for a small internal team.

That sentence held three forces in tension: the user who wants access, the regulator who limits it, and the operator who has to maintain whatever ships. Every decision had to balance all three, which is what made this an architecture problem before it was a visual one.

The hardest part of the brief was that the two main audiences pulled in different directions, and the same architecture had to serve both without compromising either.

A fast decision maker punished by depth abandons the task. A careful validator handed only speed loses trust. Designing one map that respected both became the spine of the project, and the thing I measured at the end.

I anchored the work in desk research before drawing anything. I analyzed 10 listed companies: the five largest on the Nasdaq as a baseline for recognized IR practice, and five from the health and pharma sector for domain norms. The point was to argue from precedent rather than taste, which would also matter later with Legal.

Organizing by task instead of department

The master principle was to organize the site around the visitor's journey rather than the company's org chart. The legacy structure mirrored internal areas (Company, Partnering, and so on), which forced backtracking and pushed people to external search.

On a project where compliance was one of three forces, the stakeholders were part of the design problem. I put Legal and IR inside the desk research from the start, so by the time recommendations arrived they already shared the evidence base.

Every recommendation came backed with real companies: screenshots and notes showing the pattern in the wild. A risk averse audience does not move on an aesthetic argument. It moves on “7 of 10 companies in your sector do it this way.” Precedent reframed each decision from one designer's opinion into an observed market standard.

You move people who think in risk with proof of the market rather than taste.

Regulatory alignment itself ran smoothly. The client supplied legal content already approved as PDFs, and US disclosure rules sit lighter than the Brazilian norms I came from, so compliance never became a blocker. What carried over was the method itself: every call backed by precedent, ready for the next project where the rules run stricter.

Competitors had a full multimedia layer inside events and presentations: webcasts, an in browser presentation viewer, a video repository, and audio only downloads. It was the most visible gap against the field, and the obvious thing to chase for parity.

I cut it from the MVP. The reasoning was about the company's stage rather than the feature's quality. CorMedix was listed but not yet FDA approved, which meant low traffic and few reports. The infrastructure would take significant time and content to build well, and it carried little near term value: investors already understood this was a company with recent commercialization and no back catalogue of media to show.

Strategic note: cutting features was a deliberate decision. The company's stage was prioritized over following a competitive checklist, keeping development focused on what would bring immediate value to investors.