The civic thread that binds a nation.
CHALLENGE
The National Council for the Social Studies has an enormous responsibility as the largest professional association in the country devoted solely to social studies education. Given this charge, the organization had difficulty managing its website content and ensuring users could find what they needed.
SOLUTION
Through a robust discovery phase, New Target helped NCSS create a discovery engine powered by a taxonomic scheme and Apache Solr. The New Target design team created a modular approach for pages that provided flexibility and structure with the goal of allowing users to easily find what they’re looking for.
Strategy
We created a content migration strategy that easily allowed content to be consolidated, categorized, and migrated into their new system.
We created user journeys and flows identifying the appropriate nudges necessary to convert. The website has a lot of content, so we knew we needed to focus on discoverability of both web pages and PDFs.
Website Design & Creative Vision
From the start, we wanted to ensure that NCSS’s mission was known when someone lands on the website. To accomplish this, we focused on the use of simple, human-centered imagery.
From intuitive navigation to visual hierarchy and clear buttons, we created a website design that’s easy to navigate and drives visitors to convert.
To show the depth of content created by NCSS, we created a stream of content that allows users to feel the liveliness of the organization. This approach allows visitors to discover relevant content and to use tags and filters to provide a better user experience.
Development
We chose Drupal to power the website. To provide a seamless member experience, we integrated the site MemberMax allowing SSO (Single Sign-on) and ensuring members have access to the personalized content.
We used a combination of contributed modules along with custom modules that provide vital functions including the SSO integration, footnotes, shortcuts, granular permissions for Paragraphs, and more.