The National Kidney Foundation (NKF) is a nonprofit focused on preventing kidney disease and increasing care equity through research, education, and access programs.
The purpose of NKF’s website is primarily educational, offering kidney health content for patients, caregivers, and kidney donors as well as program information for those audiences plus medical professionals, researchers, advocates and activists, and organizational supporters. The content itself is helpful and engaging, but the journey to and through the content was stilted, confusing, and shallow. NKF needed to transform site navigation and information architecture to better support both wayfinding and exploration. NKF also needed to upgrade their system from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9/10 at the same time. Together, all of these factors brought NKF to my team at FFW.
In collaboration with Visual Design, UX Research, and our client partners, I led discovery and design phases to develop a more streamlined and accessible user journey by:
- Restructuring URL hierarchies to support findability through organic search and on-site breadcrumb navigation
- Expanding menu navigation to allow NKF’s multiple audiences to discover content tailored to their individual needs
- Enhancing layouts on key pages, like the homepage and membership information page
- Integrating new taxonomies to power content recommendations and filtering
- Supporting migration planning and opportunities for component consolidation to aid in Drupal upgrade
Right-sizing (and right-terminology-ing) the sitemap and the menu
NKF’s menu was so simple it was almost completely ineffective; without any dropdowns, users weren’t able to get a first glimpse at what content a given section might contain, let alone jump straight into specific interest areas. Section titles also caused some confusion—Does “Kidney Professionals” mean a list of nephrologists a patient could visit, or resources for healthcare providers themselves? Is “Research” a place to find medical journals or opportunities for laypeople to participate in a study? And if I’ve been living with chronic kidney disease for years, will I find any value in “Kidney Basics” or will they be too basic?
Meanwhile, in the URL site crawl, I discovered tons of opportunities to remove vague terms with unrelated subpages, nest related content into audience- or topic-based subdirectories, and create new strings and consolidate lesser-used ones to streamline content sections for better user navigation through breadcrumbs and easier analytics tracking for the client.
Plus, I identified necessary updates and potential recommendations to terminology and URL formatting to improve findability by both NKF’s audiences and search engines.
I integrated both the URL and menu navigation considerations into two visual sitemaps: one to guide URL structure and redirect strategy for migration, and one to guide visual design and content for the user-facing website menu.
After working with my UX Research colleague to tree test the new hierarchy, I partnered with Visual Design to bring the new navigation to life, in all its expanded megamenu glory.
Enhacing the homepage and membership page
As the “digital front door” to any given site, the homepage is a key touchpoint in providing users a pathway to achieve their goals and understand an organization’s mission or brand narrative. NKF homepage was in need of a refresh to improve on both purposes.
Another key touchpoint that needed a refresh were the membership pages, since professional dues are a crucial revenue stream for NKF. We updated the overview landing page to be more scannable and actionable and the interior detail pages to also be more approachable and persuasive.
Integrating taxonomy systems
Users tend to either be on a mission to find specific content or be more spontaneous and exploratory as they discover content that fits their interests. Whether these paths happen in the same browsing session or not, taxonomy is huge in helping them achieve those goals.
With a robust new categorization system from another content vendor, NKF needed us to express these terms through filters and content recommendations. We transformed the Kidney Topics (formerly A-Z) and News & Stories (formerly News and Blog) sections to power better findability and discovery.
Results
In usability testing of the NKF site prototype, medical professional participants had a 71.4% successful completion average across all tasks and the general population audience achieved 88.6% successful completion on average. The System Usability Scale (SUS) rating, which measures users’ perceptions of the system, was a 95.5 for general population and 85.5 among medical professionals—both of which fall into the A+ grade considered “best imaginable.”
Even better, however, were participants’ comments on the prototype, with quotes like:
- “I feel like it’s really well put together…I would feel comfortable referring patients to this.” – Medical professional
- “This is an excellent site…it’s well-organized, it’s visually impactful, it’s easy to navigate.” – General population
- “A personalized experience based on who you are.” – Medical professional
- “I liked how the site was organized, I liked the layout. I thought it was simple and not loaded with too much info, so it was easy for me to find what I was looking for.” – General population
- “What stands out to me is that there seems to be a feeling of hope.” – Medical professional
Sabina Leybold 