American Medical Association Website Redesign
The redesign and reorganization of the AMA’s website was an 18 month project that included stakeholders from various points in the design and content areas. The process began with a complete clean-up of the site’s taxonomy and organizational structure. My team and I worked with our content partners to strategize on how the navigation should function. We eventually decided upon incorporating a Category, Subcategory and Topic driven system. This was largely based on the business requirement to structure the site more as a media site and give the news content more opportunities to be featured throughout.
Delivering Care, Practice Management, Education and Advocacy are the site’s Categories. Each of these have a designated group of Subcategories, as shown in the fly-out for Practice Management.
page components
Working in an Atomic Design process, my team began designing different page components while the taxonomy and site organization was going on. We had a variety of components from promotional pieces, email sign-up, embeddable videos, podcasts and others to account for.
page templates
Once the content was organized, it was time to take a deep dive into the different page templates being used. In many instances, pages were being built in a manner to appease the CMS instead of usability. Some pages were built with long lists of links to either webpages, PDF documents or other valuable resources. Others simply had a paragraph or less of text with an embedded video included. Once each of these page types along with ideas for new templates that might work more dynamically were identified, the design process began for the responsive templates. In all, our team designed 8 templates, 3 different listing pages and the Category and Subcategory pages.
In the previous site, all pages were built on a basic article page. Thanks for the research and time spent with our content partners, we were able to diversify the page templates so the News Article can accommodate specifically what it needed and pages that pertained to Events or Resources could accommodate their needs.
Being a member-bassed association, the Bio Page (as we called it) was extremely important. This page was designed to contain all pertinent information about the Board of Directors of the AMA, including some information that would be gated for members only. These pages would go on to populate the People Listing page for different groups.
HOMEPAGE
A design vendor was brought in to provide a refreshed look for the Homepage. I provided supervisory guidance and review over this process to ensure the page worked within the digital guidelines put in place by my team. I worked with senior and C-Suite professionals within the company on this portion of the site. Eventually a design was selected and my team took the file and re-worked portions to make it work with the content we knew would be developed for the new site.
The Homepage was a huge opportunity for the new site to really take into consideration the user feedback that had been received. Members had issues navigating the site and often turned to Search to find what they were looking for - except that the Search didn’t function as well as it could have, either. We included a section of site navigation devoted to our Board of Trustees, House of Delegates and other high profile groups so that they could easily navigate to resources that were important to them. In many cases, these groups concerns and feedback could overrule a business need so it was important to meet their needs. We also began partnering with the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) to feature their content on our site. We wanted to find a place that was top fold for their content to be showcased and easily accessible for our members. Members Move Medicine was a new campaign that was really responding with our members, so a dynamic component was created to house this content and spotlight it on the homepage.
The Homepage came together in a way that really featured all of the new templates and content strategy that was put into gear. We were able to feature things like Upcoming Events and Explore Topics in ways that succinctly directed our members to exactly what they came to our site for.
Where We're At Now
After the launch, bugs and enhancements were reported to the development team and my team is working through those with them. In addition, we’ll be testing a few of the different templates that were created at the AMA’s Annual event to begin design iterations.