Problem
As the world's largest surgical institution, the American College of Surgeons struggled to maintain a labyrinthine, legacy website with dozens of divisions, and thousands of disparate pieces of content. Since they catered to medical professionals, as well as patients, the tone of ACS's materials often wavered, resulting in confusion and inconsistent UXs. Given the sheer quantity of web pages, and the varied audiences between them, only a migration overseen by Hugo & Cat would do.
Process
Building upon a comprehensive audit sheet, I leapt head-first into the project, combing through every major landing page and section of the ACS website. I then participated in a series of interviews and co-design workshops led by our UX director, treejack testing IAs and mid-fi wireframes in front of ACS and potential users. We followed with a live-survey on the ACS site, gauging visitors' reactions to sample copy written in three distinct personas. In tandem with this, I augmented my audit into a DAKI, indicating the pages to keep, discard, and improve.
Solution
After months of sprints, audio sessions in Slack, and copious commenting in Figma, we presented our final recommendations for the redesigned ACS.org to be migrated to Umbraco. We proposed an authoritative, yet supportive voice and tone for ACS—one that could seamlessly shift from speaking to surgeons, hospital administrators, medical professionals, and patients seeking advice about surgery. Supplementing this, I devised a new taxonomy for tagging and organizing, along with content creation guidelines that could be consulted by ACS in the years ahead.
Outcome
We repositioned ACS as the world's largest and oldest surgical institution, and equipped them with a robust and highly personalized website that could entice new membership. I came away incredibly grateful for my UX director and her adamant belief in cross-functional design, be it through the Crazy 8's that she facilitated on Figma, or her frequent invitations to participate in user interviews. Once migrated to Umbraco, ACS saw a 40% increase in member applications, and a 42% increase in average user session duration over the span of 9 months.
