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Case
National Board of Medical Examiners: Website Redesign
Activating a new digital experience

As part of our rebrand work with the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME), we found that the organization struggled with a disengaged and, at times, frustrated customer base. This situation was only made worse by an outdated website that felt chaotic, unresponsive, and overly corporate.

Challenge

NBME’s website did not portray an organization that was driving innovation in the medical education community. When we first engaged with NBME, the website was 12 years old, hard coded, and was not mobile responsive. It included over 100 pages managed by multiple teams across the business and lacked a coherent content strategy—where content updates could be made at all.

 

The result was that any visitor looking to engage with the organization faced a disjointed and confusing experience that was likely to damage their perceptions of the brand.

Solution

The solution, we knew, was in enhancing their user experience and pulling elements of the new NBME brand story into an updated website.

 

Together, with NBME’s internal marketing and IT teams, we set out to understand NBME’s goals for a new site, how the market was using the old one, and how we could create a more seamless user experience that would increase engagement and improve the overall experience users had on the site.

Strategy

After completing an audit of the old NBME site, an analysis of the Google Analytics data, and a review of competitors’ websites, we set out to identify and define the most important audiences the site needed to engage.

 

From there, we used a series of online surveys and qualitative interviews with real site visitors to map out user goals for each of the priority audiences we identified. In total we identified six use cases and defined the ideal user journey for each one of them. With this foundation in place, we then mapped the full site and created the wireframes for each key page template.

Creative

Designing the site to be mobile first, we utilized the new NBME branding and developed two design concepts. We wanted to bring clarity to the website and mirror the organization’s goal of simplifying its offering. Once aligned on the design direction, we worked closely with the team at NBME to create refreshed content for the entire site.

Activation

The business needed a flexible and secure website that a variety of stakeholders could easily access and update. To account for this, we built the site on a Drupal CMS.

 

We followed a development schedule with two-week sprints to give our developers and the client team manageable review stages. We then worked closely with the business to QA the new website and integrate with their new Salesforce implementation.

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