- Employer: Unleashed Technologies
- Client: American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)
- Related Organizations: Gravitate
- Roles: Solutions Architect; Business Analyst; Information Architect; Digital Strategist; UX Strategist
- Technology: Drupal; Acquia (hosting); NetFORUM AMS; Bynder (DAM); Acquia Lift (content personalization)
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit Association, AMIA's 5,500+ members are subject matter experts in the science and practice of informatics as it relates to clinical care, research, education, and policy.
Challenges
AMIA had a website, built in 2011 using Drupal 6. It was later migrated to Drupal 7. They identified several design and usability concerns with the website. The website talks to the NetFORUM AMS for single sign-on and membership data. There are several satellite websites for the AMIA community, an LMS, and four journal publications. AMIA wanted to improve the website with a fresh design, provide a more personalized experience, improve UX, restructure IA, revamp content strategy, create a more friendly SSO, and integrate cleanly with their AMS. AMIA stated their objective to “become the premier destination for informatics leadership in online education, professional development and certification, health informatics public policy, and networking and personal engagement for informatics students, professionals and the broader health and healthcare community."
Several issues were identified by AMIA stakeholders and users who talked to:
- Difficulty navigating with too many choices
- Conversion funnels are unclear
- Inconsistent headings and calls-to-action
- Limited search options and results
- Inconsistent visual design elements
- Lack of a library for images
- Limited content posting workflow through marcom and web staff
- A frustrating single sign-on process
Solutions
Throughout the discovery, design, and building efforts, our solutions focused on:
- An improved website experience with the Drupal 8 CMS
- Empathy for website user and member needs
- Engaging content and a modern, mobile-friendly visual design
- Revised information architecture with better navigation and search
- Easy content management, workflows, and a new content strategy
- Improvements to events and course pages, including a course catalog
- Sponsored content and advertisements using Google Ad Manager
- Integration with the Bynder digital asset management (DAM) system
- A personalized experience with Acquia Lift
- An improved single sign-on process for the website
In-person user interviews, card sorting exercises, user research, and user surveys helped us better understand pain points, user needs, and ways to improve information architecture. The card sorting exercise helped us identify prioritized navigation items and labels to better group menu links, relevant to common user activities.
Content features were designed and included: files and media (that sync with Bynder); basic pages, landing pages with rich layout tools, user profiles to allow strong content personalization, person pages (e.g., speakers, instructors, staff), organization pages (e.g., sponsors, exhibitors), group pages (e.g., working groups, committees), events (e.g., webinars, symposiums), courses, education programs, news posts, publication articles, public policy pages, and podcast episodes. Content can also be designated for “member only” access using a paywall feature.
Website taxonomy was restructured to accommodate navigation and information context. This included global taxonomy for topics, tags, audience, and AMIA’s domains. There are specific taxonomy structures to help each content feature and search options.
Search features were vastly improved for both the main website search and special case search pages, like the course catalog. This allows website visitors to more readily find information that applies to their specific needs.
Personalization with Acquia Lift is configured to track a website visitor’s reading activity. If they are logged in, the information about their interests and experience along with other data points help Acquia Lift assign them to a strongly-suited audience segment. Content areas will continue to be created after the website launch that allows AMIA to define personalized content for users to see, based on their audience segment.
An integration with the NetFORUM AMS—in collaboration with Gravitate—was created to sync user profile data and to facilitate SSO connectivity. The AMS provides an e-commerce website, called “eWeb,” which allows visitors and members to make purchases and manage their user profile.
Content was migrated with both automation tools—for high volume content types—and manual migration efforts. Since content types and structure changed from the Drupal 7 website to the Drupal 8 website, we remapped and normalized data in transit. The manual migration efforts helped familiarize AMIA with the new website and work out content management usability issues before the website launch.
The new AMIA website has an improved, mobile-friendly, responsive design that uses Bootstrap 4 based theme—Barrio.
Results
When the new AMIA website launches, the KPIs that we defined will be measured along with other metrics to help learn what continuous improvements can be prioritized. These KPIs include:
- Customer satisfaction
- Membership counts and sales
- Event attendance capacity ratio and sales
- Education sales
- Non-journal publication content readership
- Impact of AMIA
AMIA will meet with Unleashed Technologies on a monthly basis to review observations and consider recommendations. Please see my presentation on how to create and use a Performance Measurement Framework for more details.