AMSN Website Assessment & Redesign Leadership

The Challenge

When nurses need information from their professional organization, they usually need it right away. Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses (AMSN) had an outdated website containing clinical guidance, continuing education, Q&As, and discussion on a wealth of topics—but this content was spread throughout the website and hard to find. Additionally, content items on the same topic were not cross-referenced to each other.

Some of AMSN’s best and newest content resided in the organization’s online community, completely separated from the main website, and undiscoverable by searching and browsing the website. Users on topical pages on the website might miss content on the same topics that was published in the online community, and vice versa.

Our Work

Olkin Communications Consulting conducted a user-centered assessment of the website and subsequently led a redesign of the site that included staff workshops, user research, content strategy, information architecture, taxonomy, and search design. The redesign made clinical content, and all content, easier for the website audiences to find and use. It also gave staff a strategy for making sure content on clinical topics would be unified in the future. The new site launched in 2020. [Note: The site has changed somewhat since then, under new organizational leadership. The images below represent our finished work.]

Website Assessment & User Research

Our engagement with AMSN started with a website assessment and user research to learn what site users wanted and needed. The assessment included a review of the organization’s digital brand, a survey of members and nonmembers, and an heuristic evaluation of the main website, store, library, and community.

Content Strategy, Information Architecture & Taxonomy

Leading content strategy and information architecture for the website redesign, we advised our client on culling and reorganizing the content.

We created logical navigation categories, making content more easily discoverable by browsing.

We also provided a taxonomy (content classification scheme) so content could be listed, cross-referenced, and filtered by topic, format, and other meaningful characteristics.

Search Design

Our search partners (FUSENext) implemented a federated search tool that allows site search to pull results from all our client’s content repositories, including the main website and online community. We developed the search taxonomy and helped design the search experience, including using the search tool to dynamically generate topical listing pages.

Outcomes

One of the major failings of the old website was the fact that “practice guidance”—that is, how to do certain things as a nurse—was spread out all over the website and in the online community. It was impossible to find all the best practice guidance through navigation or through search. We fixed this by creating a main navigation category called Practice, and providing topical collections there, on a landing page called Topics.

On the Topics page (see below), the new AMSN taxonomy we developed is visible and browsable. This page was a huge improvement over the old site, because a nurse could go to one page and find all the content AMSN has about a specific topic.

The resulting website made it quicker and easier for website visitors to understand what the site contains, find what they need quickly, and see the value of joining the organization to get access to members-only content and discussion.