College of American Pathologist - VSA Partners
The redesign of CAP.org represented a rare opportunity to present the business and the brand in a new light, to reconnect with current and new audiences, and to become more strategic.
The areas of focus in the redesign included:
Audience: a new version of the site designed for and around the CAP’s primary audiences (Members and Customers), focusing on the strategy for integrating and elevating relevant member and prospective member content contextually throughout the site.
Navigation-centric: a site structure that demonstrates the CAP’s value proposition and breath of offerings to all of its key audiences.
Launch date: 2014
My role: lead User Experience Architect in charge of designing experience. Working very closely with partner and internal stakeholders, educating and guiding them through the design process. Also, in charge of planning and executing a series of usability studies.
What we started with…
An outdated looking site, with an overwhelming amount of information. A site that was not responsive. A site that was difficult to navigate.
With the incredible amount of content the CAP wanted to support, testing site architecture concepts was the priority.
Information Architecture
Working closely with the Content Management team, we created a few versions of an updated site map, and conducted tree testing to validate approaches. Ultimately, we knew it was necessary to simplify the experience, while still providing members and customers access to the wealth of information.
Getting both the structure and the naming convention right became imperative.
With the site map concepts, we helped the stakeholders to conceptualize the information space and ultimately assess and plan how it would be structured, grouped, and sequenced to render an optional user experience.
How it evolved…
In addition to an improved and validated site architecture, we created a cleaner, more digestible experience that consisted of a series of components or modules that stacked and/or resized as the user navigated between breakpoints.
Updated design decision: while not represented here as this is a wireframe, the home page became a more visual experience. It moved away from cramming content, to one that presented the most prominent information for the user to consider and explore further as needed.
Updated design decision: the robust content that CAP had to offer was discovered as the user began to drill into the secondary or child pages.
Note: while the site has continued to evolve since I last worked on it, I encourage you to visit the current site as the overall principles outlined here still remain.
A few of the components on the original redesign of CAP.org…
A sample of comps to help illustrate how we visually cleaned up the overall experience.
