POCMA Academy

Overview:

Introduction: Invisible Cities partnered with the Point of Care Marketing Association (POCMA), a U.S.-based nonprofit serving healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical organizations, to enhance their educational offerings through the POCMA Academy project. The academy aims to provide a robust and dynamic educational platform to upskill professionals in the rapidly evolving field of point-of-care marketing.
Impact: The redesign of the POCMA Academy page resulted in a significantly improved user experience, increased engagement, and better content presentation, setting the stage for the academy's expansion to a 7-course program.
Key Takeaways: The project demonstrates the importance of a narrative-driven design approach, strategic content organization, and leveraging existing brand elements to create a cohesive and value-centered user experience.

Client Background: POCMA is a U.S.-based nonprofit that serves a diverse audience of healthcare professionals and pharmaceutical organizations, providing training and thought leadership in point-of-care marketing.
Problem Statement: The initial academy page had several shortcomings, including poor presentation of the academy's value, limited user engagement, lack of scalability for multiple courses, and a cluttered and confusing layout, leading to high bounce rates and low user retention.

Project Objectives: The redesign aimed to overhaul the user interface using a narrative-driven design approach, implement a tone-on-tone theme color scheme to align with POCMA branding, foster a better user experience through strategic content organization and enhanced visual appeal, and ensure the platform's scalability for future course additions.
Scope of Work: The project focused on a complete redesign of the academy page, improving navigation, content presentation, and user engagement. The work was executed on a WordPress platform using Elementor, although resolving the broader technical debt associated with Elementor was considered out of scope.

Research and Insights: Basic research included client/stakeholder interviews, video interviews with target audience members, and various usability tests to better understand the intersection of online learning, medical industry marketing professionals, and UI design preferences.
Strategy and Planning: The team performed a content analysis, reviewed existing brand identity work, assessed Elementor's components, authored a creative brief, and worked through multiple rounds of wireframes and refinements. The goal was to adhere to the best of POCMA's identity and brand approach while avoiding existing technical and design debt.
Design and Development: The page was approached as a B2B solution, following a standard business template structure developed by the Invisible Cities team. The design and content were put into a unified process using Figma with the DittoWords plugin, allowing for real-time testing of message coherence and preference with likely audience members.
Content Creation: The page narrative was completely reworked to create a cohesive and value-centered experience.
Testing and Optimization: Various usability tests were conducted to ensure the redesigned page met user expectations and improved overall engagement.

Quantitative Outcomes: The redesigned academy page achieved a 60% increase in time on site, a 250% increase in the likelihood to explore course content, improved organic SEO rankings due to better structured content, and a minimum 1.5 UEQ score increase across all dimensions.
Qualitative Outcomes: POCMA's president, Nicole Divinagracia, expressed her desire to redo the entire POCMA site based on the success of the academy page redesign.
Lessons Learned: The project demonstrated that completely reinventing a brand is not always necessary to achieve a better experience. By leveraging the best parts of the existing visual identity and upcycling them into a cohesive and value-centered narrative experience, the team created a fresh and modern feel for the POCMA Academy.