ERS is Europe’s largest respiratory society and one of the leading medical organisations in the respiratory field, with a growing membership spanning over 160 countries. It connects respiratory professionals from all backgrounds and offers opportunities for funding, learning, career development, and involvement in shaping public policy.
Their website is a key platform for engaging and recruiting members, promoting events and sharing knowledge. Over time their digital footprint had become fragmented. It was spread across many different websites built on different technologies which made it difficult and costly for ERS to maintain, and for members to navigate and use with an inconsistent brand experience.
The challenge was to create a new, streamlined website experience that delivered ERS’s key objectives of increasing awareness, driving membership and event registrations, and increasing valuable engagement with its members.
To ensure we fully understood the audience and organisation, we undertook a detailed research phase, developing user personas and needs through a collaborative process. This included business and membership interviews, surveys and desktop research and after a hefty content audit, we set out the IA/UX for the new website. This was developed in an iterative process with user testing and prototyping at its heart. We attended the ERS International Congress and conducted in-person user testing with the audience that allowed us to evaluate our understanding of how the organisation and its users behave, and optimise what they need from the website. The website’s structure was therefore developed with a diverse group of its audience directly influencing IA and UX decisions.
Our ambition was to create a design system that was built from a flexible library of templates, modules and components. By producing digital guidelines for the brand, we designed elements that can be easily assembled in pages to meet the needs of different users and journeys, while maintaining the integrity of the overall brand experience.
This approach means ERS has the flexibility to grow the website over time. The website strategy is planned in phases over three years and The design system produced in the first phase makes it possible to update and evolve the website over time. It allows us to rapidly and efficiently build new sections and deliver new services and functionality (for example, the new ERS Channel). The user experience will remain consistent and design and development will remain effective both in terms of usability and cost.
The new website has transformed how ERS and its members engage online bringing together 3 separate sites (main ERS website, ERS Congress and ERS Vision) under a single domain. Built using a modular approach on WordPress, it is easy to administer the website and keep its valuable scientific content updated.
In its first month of launch we can already see the impact on website KPIs with YoY comparison. Pageviews are up 36%, pages per session up 37%, time on site increased by 20%, while bounce rates have dropped by 10% and click through rates from search have doubled.
The website and its content is optimised to maximise visibility and therefore attract more relevant traffic. The process of publishing, promoting and managing content and events has been simplified, and it is easier to see on-site behaviour in order to plan for the future. We have created a long-term platform that is usable, findable (and shareable) and trackable to allow for future enhancement.
“After many years of adding to our vast amounts of website content, we had lost sight of the end user. Pixeled Eggs enabled us to put the user back into focus and helped us to create a structure which is both intuitive for users and accommodating of our many needs as an organisation. A month after the launch of the new site, we are already seeing very positive statistics in terms of key performance indicators.” Dawn Ould – Communications Manager