American Association of Ophthalmology Website and O.N.E. Network Needs Assessment

by Lori Anschuetz

Background

Client: The American Academy of Ophthalmology is the largest national membership association of Eye MDs. More than 90 percent of practicing U.S. Eye MDs are Academy members; the Academy also has more than 7,000 international members.

Website: The Academy’s main website (www.aao.org) provides members with access to services and resources for practicing ophthalmology and running their practice. This “parent” site incorporates the Ophthalmic News and Education (O.N.E.) Network (one.aao.org), a broad and deep collection of knowledge resources that encourages lifelong learning with periodic self-assessment.

Challenges: The Academy intends to redesign its website in anticipation that users in the future will have vastly different levels of technology. The site must serve new users in developing nations with little technical infrastructure as well as long-term, tech-savvy members using iPhones, smartphones, and netbooks.

Objective: An Information Architecture Strategy

Following the best principles of user-centered design, the Academy requested a needs assessment to inform the requirements for its website redesign, and engaged Tec Ed to conduct it. The 8 week assessment would produce a high-level information architecture (IA) strategy and recommendations for conceptual options for addressing AAO.org and O.N.E. Network redesign.

Information architecture (IA) is a key component in the effort to improve any website. An IA is composed of organization, navigation, labeling, and searching systems. These systems play a central role in determining whether users can easily find the information they need. They also influence the long term costs of managing the dynamic growth and continual change of online information resources.

A successful IA must be informed by the broader context in which it exists. Each organization has a unique mission, vision, culture, and resource base. Each content collection presents different challenges, based on its mix of document types, formats, and structures. Each major audience has distinctive information needs, modes of searching, and levels of expertise.

Solutions

Information architecture design occurs at the intersection of the organization, the content it wants to communicate, and the intended users of that content. To understand that intersection for AAO.org and the O.N.E. Network, Tec-Ed defined several activities:

• Review of Academy research and other materials for background on previous site redesign efforts.
• Interviews with Academy opinion leaders, thought leaders, and stakeholders to explore their assessments of the current information environment and their vision for the Academy, AAO.org, and the O.N.E. Network.
• User research activities at the Academy’s annual meeting, including card-sort sessions to learn about users’ “mental models” of the content on AAO.org and the O.N.E. Network, and usability testing to gain insight into the difficulties members encounter doing typical tasks.
• Analysis of the current content of AAO.org and the O.N.E. Network to inform decisions about content organization. The top-down content analysis examined the high-level organization, navigation, and labeling of the existing sites. The bottom-up analysis identified a representative sample of documents and objects within the sites.

Results

Tec Ed’s research and analysis culminated in high-level recommendations for structuring and organizing AAO.org and the O.N.E. Network, including wireframes (essentially block diagrams) of the home page and landing pages. IA recommendations can be time-consuming to implement, but subtle changes in AAO.org since earlier this year reflect some of Tec-Ed’s recommendations.

• Major Academy-branded subsites are listed, showing the Academy is a unified body and a source for all ophthalmic information.
• Lighter, streamlined look and feel.
• Fat footer makes secondary navigation visible and persistent.

“Your whole team was great in delivering on time . . . We absolutely gained valuable insight from the project . . . I commend you and your staff for your professionalism, responsiveness, and diligence.”
Bill Taggart, Director, Web and Member Communications

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