American College of Surgeons

Challenge

As the world’s largest surgical institution, the American College of Surgeons struggled to maintain a labyrinthine, legacy website with dozens of divisions, and thousands of disparate pieces of content. Since they catered to medical professionals, as well as patients, the tone of ACS’s materials often wavered, resulting in confusion and inconsistent UXs.

ACS partnered with Hugo & Cat (an award-winning agency) to re-design their site, and boost their membership numbers, without compromising their brand.

Task

Hugo & Cat hired me (on a 3-6 month project basis) as their Lead Sr. Content Strategist on ACS to do a number of things:

• Audit the entirety of the American College of Surgeon’s website, and re-organize its navigation and hierarchy of web pages.
• Review wireframes and prototypes for a home page, all landing pages, and templated pages, focusing on voice and tone of copy.
• Participate in multiple rounds of UX research, directing my questions to volunteer users, and synthesizing key takeaways for team analysis.
• Pitch major stakeholders at ACS on the themes of the improvements we wished to make, and prioritize content for the migration/re-design.

Along the way, I plugged into Hugo & Cat’s workstreams on Slack, took part in daily stand-ups and weekly client calls on Zoom, and became the living single-source-of-truth for any given web page on ACS.org and its raison d’etre.

Action

In order to grasp ACS, and their audiences’ content needs, I took advantage of the team Hugo & Cat had already assembled:

• I collaborated with the UX Director to render ACS’s information architecture in Figma, allowing us to easily visualize the branching of content.
• Hosting co-design sessions like Crazy Eight, our whole team sketched their visions for the ACS home page, and newly-proposed landing pages.
• Building upon existing UX research, I wrote landing page copy in 3 distinct “archetypes” which were A/B tested through surveys on the ACS site.
• After analyzing the results of our A/B tests, we presented Figma prototypes to volunteer surgeons, and continued to iterate on their feedback.

Once we had solidified a design direction for ACS, I developed a new taxonomy which enhanced navigation and search functionality within the site. In tandem, I annotated our audit sheet, marking pages that were to be prioritized, merged, or omitted for the migration to Umbraco.

Results

After we presented our final set of design proposals to the ACS leadership, we received their blessings to commence with their migration to Umbraco.

• Within 9 months, the ACS saw a 40% increase in its member applications, and a 42% increase in average user session duration.
• ACS renewed its contract with Hugo & Cat for the expansion of its patient-centric content. I returned to spearhead much of this.
• Between 2022 and 2024 (at the conclusion of their migration) ACS surged from 84,000 to 93,241 members across 144 countries.

Takeaways

My greatest mentor at Hugo & Cat, Julia Murphy, impressed on me this simple idea: everyone on your team should have some stake in your work. Co-design sessions are some of the best ways to facilitate this, and tap into the creativity of your entire team. When someone can see their mark in the final product, they’ll care that much more about it.