Client
Military Officer Association of America
Expertise
Email Template Design
Information Architecture
UX Strategy
Website Redesign
Website Strategy
Recognition
2020 Communicator Awards: Award of Excellence, Website
Improving User Experience through Personalization
Challenge
Founded almost a century ago, the Military Officers Association of America (MOAA) is the country’s largest association advocating for rights on behalf of their 350,000 military members and their families. MOAA realized that its antiquated website was a key factor in the loss of engagement and retention within its membership. The association decided that to re-engage its audience it needed to modernize and simplify the user experience (UX) for website visitors.
MOAA partnered with Beyond Definition to breathe new life into its online presence with a website redesign. After completing a joint strategic analysis, MOAA tapped Beyond Definition to restructure its website architecture so that members could easily navigate the website. The end goal was to create a more personalized online experience that provided the right information to the right audience segments. Beyond Definition and MOAA worked together to improve the MOAA website to be adaptive, flexible, and sustainable moving forward.
Outcome
MOAA’s final website redesign successfully catered to the association’s well-thought-out audience persona types as unique content is generated based on the user visiting the website at the time. If a user is logged into their account, then specific benefits, blog posts, educational resources, legislative updates, and other pertinent information is highlighted to give the visitor a personalized journey.
Beyond Definition reorganized MOAA’s large quantity of information, news programs, and tools into a layout that is easily consumable to increase retention, membership, brand awareness, and visibility of key services by reorganizing the information in a more intuitive and efficient way.
MOAA’s website redesign launched in fall 2019, and within the first few months garnered the following results:
30%
decrease in bounce rate
43.14%
increase in average session duration
31.12%
increase in site page views
26.62%
increase in pages per session
13%
of MOAA members scrolled through ALL
article pages
“Their team became true partners with us during this pivotal change for the organization. They are experts in their field and delivered stellar products that elevated MOAA’s brand.”
Phase 1Diagnostics & Discovery
Beyond Definition kicked off the website redesign project with an in-depth research and discovery process, including a workshop and interviews with key stakeholders to gain an understanding of the redesign goals, as well as a competitive analysis.
As a result of the discovery phase, Beyond Definition recommended that MOAA’s new website be structured in a way that is easily navigable and conveys the organization’s vision, mission, and values. Beyond Definition concluded that the overarching goal for the website redesign would be to increase user engagement (including return readership, advocacy actions, membership and product transactions, social shares), thus providing a more personalized UX for increased engagement.
Phase 2IA and UX and Web Design
Restructuring the content of MOAA.org, organizing content to create intuitive navigation paths for users, guiding users initially to the information they seek and then more deeply into the website as they continue to explore the content. UX decisions concentrated on making the website easier for visitors to use, while also finding ways to increase user engagement with the content.
Simplifying the navigation for site visitors was a key factor of the association’s website redesign. This allowed for curated navigation paths and more white space for the navigation options. This simplification now helps users quickly orient themselves when they land on the site, enabling them to quickly find the information they are seeking. On top of easier navigation, Beyond Definition designed the search functionality to be clearer, more effective, and visually appealing. MOAA felt that search is an important tool for its website visitors and that the search functionality on its new CMS is quite powerful.
Phase 3Creative Implementation
The team focused on the site’s aesthetics designing with a focus on strong, consistent usage of the established MOAA brand. The design team also explored ways to push the boundaries of the brand in order to create a website design that is visually pleasing, interesting, and effective. As the flexibility of webpages was an important consideration for MOAA to manage in-house, designs were created in a manner that allowed modifiable templates for continued website improvements that enhanced their member’s experience online.
