American College of Physicians
Brand-strong and 23,000-pages-flexible: Happy Cog’s ACP redesign.
The American College of Physicians (ACP), headquartered in Philadelphia, is the largest medical specialty organization in the US, with over 120,000 members. The non-profit organization serves doctors of internal medicine (internists), providing publications, education, and advocacy to help their members improve patient care and foster excellence in the practice of medicine.
The main web presence for the organization, acponline.org, serves as the flagship destination for members. The site serves a vital role in communicating the message of the organization while providing access to the vast array or programs, products and services they provide.
ACP realized it was time to rethink the site to help members, medical residents, students, patients and their families to find the information they needed efficiently. ACP was well on its way in reconstructing the site architecture and taxonomy. They needed a partner to bring the design to life. The design had to be flexible enough to support roughly 23,000 pages, as well as faithfully represent the core brand proposition across multiple ancillary and publication websites.
Was the blueprint sound?
Happy Cog audited the architecture work performed to date, and agreed that clear audience-specific pathways offered the best way to direct the multitude of users to the content that was most relevant to them. Although we made some recommendations regarding more intuitive label choices for section headings and navigational consistency, we were very excited with the work ACP had already done to refine the architecture.
Vibrant, yet professional and authoritative
The old site design was dated. It needed a healthy dose of vibrancy, while maintaining the professionalism and trustworthiness ACP is known for. We arrived at a design that preserved the logical content hierarchy and organized structure. We also choose to use a limited but engaging color scheme that adheres to ACP’s standard color palette, and complements the layout’s white space.
Responsibilities
Information architecture audit, brand design and consulting, graphic design, user interface design, CSS/XHTML template development. Launched 28 January 2008.