Ontario Veterinary Medical Association

The Ontario Veterinary Medical Association (OVMA) stands as Canada's preeminent veterinary association, dedicated to supporting veterinarians' well-being and professional development to further both animal and human health. Guided by values of integrity, connection, community, innovation, and care, OVMA fosters a collaborative environment where thousands of veterinarians find their collective voice in the province. As a trusted resource, OVMA offers a wealth of services including news updates, top-tier continuing education, extensive practice management resources, and invaluable work-life balance and career guidance, all of which play a pivotal role in aiding practice owners, associates, and students in achieving their personal and professional aspirations. 

Project Summary 

OVMA approached Inorbital to re-design and re-build their website and intranet portal. Originally built with a proprietary CMS over 12 years ago, the site had outgrown its initial build and had become increasingly difficult to manage and maintain. Going into the project, OVMA  also had a new logo and a new vision for their website that included a user centric approach that supported the goals of their users and organization. This project included strategy, information architecture, UX research, design and development.  

Goals 

• Design and build new OVMA website with refreshed brand. 

• Reimagine the information architecture and improve the user experience. 

• Build custom tools to manage classifieds and locum bank sections of the website 

• Make the website easy to update and manage. 

Scope of Work

Challenges 

The OVMA website design was from the early 2000’s. Page layouts were very rigid and content within the pages was text heavy and lacking visual hierarchy. Often the pages were very long, and it was challenging for users to quickly find the information they are looking for. The menu systems were extensive as an attempt to make things easier to find, but this did the opposite. As the website aged the disorganization of the content was in full display with a lot of menu items that needed to be removed. To make matters worse the menu included both member and non-member content frustrating the user experience by taking users off the site to their member management website to login.

Our Approach 

Information Architecture 

We redesigned the information architecture from the ground up. Inorbital conducted a full-scale content audit of this site and approached the process with the end users and organizational goals in mind. Through the process we identified several opportunities to improve the menu by designing user interface controls that would allow users to find what they are looking for within a page. Examples of this can be seen on the Resource Library, Classifieds, News and Events pages. Removing the members only content from the navigation and separating it on its own navigation also helped clean up the menu system.   

User Experience Design 

A lot of the issues with the old website had to do with an overly complicated menu system and pages that were static and hard to read. Our approach to the design was to make the website layout more dynamic and flexible. We built a series of widgets that would dynamically populate based on the content type. This allowed the site to serve related content to users visiting a page without any content editing needed. For longer pages we included a sticky anchor menu and a side menu that would stay fixed on two column pages to make it easier for users to know where they are on a page and navigate the content within it. 

Custom tools 

The new OVMA website features custom applications built within the CMS to allow administrators to manage classified and locums posts. These applications are connected with forms on the site where someone can submit an ad for approval. The application allows administrators to search ad requests, approve or reject them as well as mange them within an interface that will dynamically generate an email based on pricing criteria provided by OVMA. When approved the application will auto generate a PDF receipt and summary of the ad.   

Content Management System 

One of the biggest considerations when starting this project was to go with a solution that had an easy to use and intuitive interface that would be easy for content editors to do their jobs. Kentico DXP has not only met this expectation for OVMA but has far exceeded it. We maximized control for content editors by building a series of drag and drop widgets to be used with Kentico Page builder to manage content. These widgets combined with the use of structured content for repeated content and feeds has allowed editors to get the best of both worlds: easy customizable layouts as well as organized structure for repeated pages with no setup needed.  

Results 

The design is modern and the interface is easy to use. The content editors have enjoyed working with Kentico and have taken pride in making the content interactive and engaging. The website is getting overwhelmingly positive reviews by the members that it serves and the staff that is managing it.