The American Medical Association
Enterprise Website for the AMA
Elevating the American Medical Association's digital presence through design, enhancing physician engagement and streamlining access to critical medical resources across a unified platform to accelerate the spread of vital healthcare information and support the advancement of medical practice nationwide.
Background
The American Medical Association, the nation's leading professional organization for physicians, needed to modernize its main corporate website to better serve it’s millions of medical professional users. With content consumption patterns evolving and membership conversion goals becoming more critical, AMA required UX solutions that balanced clinical professionalism with intuitive digital experiences across the website.
The Challenge
AMA's legacy components created friction points: physicians struggled with content discoverability in long-form articles, hit dead-ends in gated content flows, and abandoned underperforming CTAs. Internal content editors battled cumbersome CMS tools, while accessibility gaps risked alienating users. The organization needed cohesive solutions that worked across the different medical professional archetypes, a new style, and internal stakeholder requirements.
Screenshot of the American medical associations website before redesign
The Opportunity
This redesign initiative became a catalyst for establishing AMA's first unified design system - an opportunity to align disconnected content templates into a coherent experience. By solving core interaction problems, we could simultaneously boost member conversion rates by 3% while reducing CMS training time.
Dynamic Content Hierachy
Introduced modular accordion components that achieved an interaction rate of 40% the month after the feature launched, while maintaining full SEO visibility. The AA-compliant design featured three main components. Progressive disclosure patterns that increased content scanability. SOLR-integrated search within collapsible panels. CMS templates enabled editors to build accordions in 3 clicks. The updates resulted in 75% user retention rate for accordion-enhanced pages.
Interactive prototype. Might need to scroll to the right then down to see the accordion.
Identifying More Users
Redesigned the content gate experience to stop a loop in a user flow. We implemented clear permission status indicators using AMA's brand purple. We created CMS modules for custom gate messaging/benefit explanations. Introduced mobile-first designs with persistent progress indicators. This feature drove 8.53% conversion rate on gated content.
Hero Component Modernization
Proactive redesign of our main hero block addressed misaligned CTAs and brand inconsistency across homepage/article templates. Sketched concepts evolved into F-pattern layouts following eye-tracking principles. I collaborated with developers to create responsive variants and an intuitive CMS interface. Launched site-wide, the redesign achieved a 500% CTR increase, 36.52% bounce rate reduction, and 45.39% retention rate. The VP of Marketing noted immediate scalability across all templates.
CMS-Driven Design Democratization
Developed WYSIWYG authoring tools empowering editors to, create accordion stacks with the click of an icon, preview gated content experiences in staging environments, and generally improve the experience for our content editors.
Wayfinding and Storytelling Improvements
Another fix completed during my tenure at the AMA was the restructuring of the information architecture using secondary research from the Baymard Institute. On our Category page we introduced thematic subcategory clusters. We implemented "content themes" to create bridges between unrelated content. We designed persistent filter chips for specialty refinement. This increased category page engagement by 11.44%.
Accessibility Processes
To help the AMA with their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts we Instituted mandatory WCAG checkpoints for all components. In order to test for accessibility we conducted screen reader compatibility testing, created a contrast ratio validation workflow, added a step to our process where we design focus states different from but at the same time as our hover states, and acted as an extra checkpoint for developers regarding ARIA landmark implementation. We improved the AMA’s sites’ AA compliance across redesigned elements.
