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 Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses (AMSN) had an outdated website containing clinical guidance, continuing education, Q&As, and discussion on a wealth of topics—but this content was spread throughout the website and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. A user-centered assessment of the website by Olkin Communications Consulting and subsequent redesign of the site led by Olkin helped make clinical content, and all content, easier for the intended audiences to find and use.
Our Work
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.
This evaluation and the recommendations that resulted led AMSN to ask Olkin Communications to lead a redesign of the website. With design and development partners handling the visual design and technical build, Jacqui played the role of UX lead, responsible for design strategy, information architecture, and 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. Our search partners implemented a federated search tool that allows site search to pull results from all our client’s content repositories.
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 can now go to one page and find all the content AMSN has about a specific topic.
The resulting website makes 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.
