Registered Nurses Association of Ontario

As RNAO experienced rapid growth over the last decade - particularly with regard to online service delivery to its membership - its communications and IT departments found themselves managing dozens of individual websites that suffered from a lack of consistency with regard to their technical, design and messaging approaches. They engaged Raised Eyebrow to guide them through a consultative, inclusive and data-driven information architecture process with an eye to streamlining all of their websites and migrating them all into Drupal.

Out With the Old

The RNAO manages an extensive family of websites, and like many large organizations, it struggles to keep them aligned and focused on the end users’ needs. The internal project team recognized that the existing approach, where each department managed its own project sites, was not working, and that there was a collective need to present a unified and user-friendly face to members, allies and other site visitors.

Even the main rnao.org website suffered from a lack of cohesion: it was structured along departmental lines, so rather than grouping content into areas that site visitors might naturally expect to see, the menus tended to be a reflection of the RNAO’s organizational chart. While the staff on the project team could see it was a problem, they struggled to put themselves in their visitors’ shoes, so we opted to conduct an online card-sorting exercise, where we invited RNAO members to sort content into like groupings, and then compared the findings to the internal team’s groupings. The findings were illuminating, and helped RNAO staff think differently about both the website and their broader communications and organizational strategy.

In With the New

Working with RNAO's internal technical team as well as more than 20 representatives from every department in the organization, we led an in-depth consultation on their needs for the main RNAO.org website, as well as for a variety of smaller-scale sites delivering online education content, best practice guidelines, and awareness-raising and advocacy campaigns.

Project deliverables included a complete content inventory and audit of the rnao.org website, design and delivery of an online card-sorting exercise, analysis of Google Analytics reports, a new site map and 30 detailed wireframes. Raised Eyebrow leveraged our Drupal expertise to produce information architecture documents that could easily be adapted by the RNAO technical team for creating functional specifications.

Although the redesigned website is not yet live, it is in active development.

Services provided:

• Content inventory and audit;
• Card sorting;
• Information architecture and interaction design.