UI/UX Design
Crafting a Digital Hub for Directors & Leaders
Overview & Role
IoD Ireland is a dynamic network of 3000 business leaders drawn from companies large and small. Renowned for championing enhanced corporate governance standards, IoD employs its website as a central hub for both members and non-members.
This online platform offers access to diverse training programs, events, valuable resources, policies, and publications. Acknowledging the pivotal role of their website, IoD recognised the need for a redesign, aiming to impart a polished appearance and enhanced functionality. This strategic move positions IoD to further cultivate their professional network and strengthen their organisational impact.
As the UI/UX Lead Designer, I played a pivotal role in shaping a seamless and engaging digital experience for the organisation. With a passion for user-centric design and a keen eye for aesthetics, I led the design strategy, ensuring the project met and exceeded the expectations of both stakeholders and end-users.
Challenges & Objectives
The project's core objective was to revamp the IoD Ireland website to align with organisational goals, encompassing:
Brand Articulation: Expressing IoD’s brand identity and establishing leadership in their sector.
Membership Growth and Retention: Attracting new members while ensuring satisfaction and engagement for current ones.
Digital Presence and Member Benefits: Creating a user-friendly platform for membership management, event bookings, and access to exclusive resources. Additionally, members could benefit from special discounts, including preferential rates for Directors and Officers insurance.
We engaged with stakeholders to pinpoint challenges and conducted interviews with IoD members to delve deeper into their interactions with the website, seeking insights for improvement.
Our goal was to elevate the visibility of membership by implementing clear signposting and creating an intuitive user journey. This involved guiding potential members seamlessly through the array of benefits, culminating in a straightforward path to the online application form.
We identified that the navigation system was overly complex and overwhelming. We focused on introducing a clear and structured navigation, fore-fronting top performing pages to ensure a more straightforward user journey, and introducing a menu dropdown for easily accessible content.
The content order has been greatly improved to match the users needs and facilitate click-throughs as we observed certain pages lacked engagement due to irrelevant content. The page layout was also enhanced to ensure the content was presented in an engaging way with more prominence given to CTAs, for example to join IoD.
Previously, the member application process was laborious and we identified that there was a lack of action based confirmation messages. One of the main goals is to encourage users to apply, so we spent more time revisiting this crucial step. Ultimately, we broke the application into multiple steps, making the information and overall process more visually digestible and manageable for the user and included confirmation messages to promote confidence. This concept followed for the expression of interest form and all event and training booking forms.
For the concept design, we focused on user engagement through animations, interactivity and imagery for a more immersive experience. By taking a mobile first approach to our design explorations we were able to accommodate users across devices.
We also focused on effectively rolling out IoD’s new brand - bringing it to life online and pushing the possibilities, which ultimately provides a more aesthetically pleasing & pleasant user experience, while also accurately representing IoD’s market position.
The Result
The new IoD website has garnered positive feedback for its appearance and functionality, particularly praised for the user-friendly event booking and membership renewal processes. Members express satisfaction with the smooth transition, describing the site as sharp and impressive.
Analytics post-launch reveal a 34% increase in page views and a 35.26% rise in pages per session, indicating heightened user engagement. The bounce rate dropped by 36.07%, signalling improved relevance and attractiveness of pages. The average session duration rose by 42.55% to an ideal 3 minutes and 21 seconds.
The site's performance, assessed through Google's Page Speed Insights, exhibits a substantial improvement. Desktop performance rating increased from 42 to 93, while mobile performance rose from 7 to 72.
Notably, event and course bookings witnessed a significant surge post-launch, with 6,428 event bookings and 153 workshop bookings, showcasing the site's effectiveness.