Royal College of Ophthalmologists

The challenge

Everyone deserves the right to quality eye care and The Royal College of Ophthalmologists exists to ensure that this is a reality for patients both in the UK and around the world. Working with organisations within the NHS and the further eye care sector, the college provides professional development as well as guidance and training for their members. In addition to this, they also develop policy-led activities that bring positive change in patient care and healthcare.

The previous iteration of the website lacked intuitive UX and neglected brand guidelines had meant that the website design looked tired and outdated. Furthermore, survey results showed that while 70% of members’ expectations were exceeded with their membership, only around 16% would use the existing website as their primary medium to engage with the college.

The brief

Starting back in the Autumn of 2019, The Royal College approached us with the ambition of creating a professional-looking new website that not only added value to their members but led the way in terms of brand, tone of voice and content creation to position themselves as leaders in the debate on patient care and the profession. 

The College had also undergone significant operational changes to widen its stakeholder engagement which is something that remained core throughout the Discovery phase to guarantee the website not only catered for their members but those within government, the Department of Health, NHS England and other commissioning health bodies.

The process

Following an in-depth Discovery process, the site focused primarily on the college’s audience – their members. Made up of Ophthalmologists in training, consultants, speciality and associate specialist doctors and overseas doctors. Building from an external content strategy, we created an intuitive UX grounded in solid information architecture. A key deliverable from this is the first-person drop-down menu which allows users to quickly navigate to key pages across the site.

Alongside this, members can now easily identify key events throughout the year thanks to a filterable events listing, which also features an automatically updating availability counter for each event. Also new for the College is a statistics component that highlights the impact of the work they do, from the number of peer-reviewed papers submitted to their publication to the savings the National Ophthalmology Database Audit has provided to the NHS!

The solution

The outcome is a powerful and professional new website that not only represents the College more fittingly as leaders within their sector but provides greater value for its users, such as their training hub which acts as a ‘one-stop shop’ for doctors in training and for trainers.

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