Crisis Prevention Institute (Redesign)
The Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI) identified a need for a user experience that more clearly presented its mission and had an intuitive user flow. To achieve this, they partnered with The C2 Group to engage in a redesign and replatforming project.
The Challenge
For customers coming to the CPI site, interest in it's services is often spurred by a necessity to be compliant with new workplace safety legislation or mitigate the fallout of a recent crisis incident. Thus, CPI’s site is an integral lead generation and conversion tool. Unfortunately, the existing site had design, architecture, and messaging issues. During a user experience (UX) test, visitors who were given 5 seconds to determine the site's purpose guessed incorrectly that it was primarily for “COVID prevention” or “mental health services.” Furthermore, internal content teams found it difficult to standardize page templates in this legacy system. Not only was the existing CMS not user-friendly, but publishing content tended to cause bugs requiring more CPI resources to correct the issue.
These challenges presented numerous opportunities for C2 to have a drastic impact on the external and internal experiences that CPI offered.
Cluttered Design
The design of CPI’s site lacked clarity as to the organization’s purpose, and its animation and slider features on the home page were distracting and confusing. Though users from various target audiences came seeking direction and help, it took them too long to find information for their industry, leading to frustration and funnel drop off. Additionally, it was difficult for users to locate and understand a core feature of CPI’s program structure, the "train-the-trainer" model. With a site lacking clear messaging, confusing architecture, and distracting design, CPI wasn’t doing all it could to lower it's cost to serve and self-directed potential customers find the right service for their audience segment.
Poor IA and Messaging
CPI wanted visitors to take certain actions when visiting its .com. The primary CTAs asked users to either purchase programs directly through the e-commerce site’s online store or schedule a consultation for more information. Unfortunately, an ineffective information architecture didn’t intuitively lead users to these primary conversion points. With audiences across broad industries, including healthcare, behavioral health, social services, dementia care, education, retail, and security, site architecture needed to not only lead users to action but also help them find the programs that were right for them. Unfortunately, messaging around the value of each program and which programs were best for various industries was unclear.
Manual Page Building
During discovery calls with C2, CPI expressed frustration with its current CMS. Page building in their former digital experience platform (DXP) was clunky and laborious. Due to the lack of standardization across the site and no page builder or blocks tools, the design team spent time custom-building every single template. Even once all development work was complete, new issues and bugs would pop up when pushing website content live.
"Our previous site was housed on an outdated and soon-to-be unsupported version of Kentico. Our public website, e-commerce, and customer portal were all built on Kentico and didn’t provide marketing autonomy to make quick changes. C2 helped us build a public website on a new CMS that decoupled it from the customer portal. It was built mobile responsive and with easy-to-build templates." Kim Anderson, Director of Digital Experience, Crisis Prevention Institute
"Our previous site was housed on an outdated and soon-to-be unsupported version of Kentico. Our public website, e-commerce, and customer portal were all built on Kentico and didn’t provide marketing autonomy to make quick changes. C2 helped us build a public website on a new CMS that decoupled it from the customer portal. It was built mobile responsive and with easy-to-build templates." Kim Anderson, Director of Digital Experience, Crisis Prevention Institute
"Our previous site was housed on an outdated and soon-to-be unsupported version of Kentico. Our public website, e-commerce, and customer portal were all built on Kentico and didn’t provide marketing autonomy to make quick changes. C2 helped us build a public website on a new CMS that decoupled it from the customer portal. It was built mobile responsive and with easy-to-build templates." Kim Anderson, Director of Digital Experience, Crisis Prevention Institute
Solution
The redesign and replatforming of CPI’s site achieved the goals set forth by the business. Optimizely, CPI's new CMS/DXP, was leveraged to clearly articulate CPI’s mission while providing a more intuitive customer journey. Customers can now more quickly find program and training information for their industry so they know what to purchase with less involvement from CPI's sales team. If they have questions, it’s also very easy to schedule a consultation at any point in their journey.
Intuitive Design
For the redesign of the site, the C2 team modernized and simplified the look of the page layouts. We created 15 template options to standardize pages while incorporating CPI’s longstanding visual elements. The improved user flow now naturally leads visitors to complete key actions, such as finding a training, scheduling a consultation, or downloading a resource.
Audience segmentation is now clear, and both main navigation and page navigation are more streamlined and intuitive. As requested, end stages are no more than three levels deep based on an easy-to-follow user flow.
Top-of-funnel users (ToFu) can quickly convert to bottom-funnel users (BoFu), with the option to find training that naturally leads them from industry and issue to the appropriate program—complete with pricing details. Over time, elevating the customer experience will naturally increase the site's authority ranking.
Efficient Content Governance
CPI’s new CMS, Optimizely, provides more intuitive and straightforward editing and publishing options than its previous system. With new features like block builders and templates, content creators are now able to build quicker and more accurately, reducing frustration and on-page issues.
Sections of the site currently in progress are now gated by password protection, enabling senior leaders to strategically grant various levels of permission for specific users. As pointed out by CPI, this helps with quality control, with one team member stating, “We don’t want everyone having the ability to modify all sections of the site.”
Effective IA and Messaging
A key part of CPI’s redesign and replatforming is its improved information architecture and sitemap. With a more intuitive structure, users now enjoy a more focused journey, making the CMS digital marketing tool much more effective.
To clarify CPI’s message, mentions of customized programs and information on the train-the-trainer framework now appear high on the home page. This aids users in quickly and easily understanding the purpose of CPI’s site. Additionally, lowering heading and subheading character counts helps visitors scan the site during navigation, leading to increased engagement.
In the main navigation, programs are now grouped as dropdowns for a more direct path to conversion. This is key for segmenting users within the ecommerce platform. By using best practices for site updates throughout ongoing search engine indexing, bounce rate will drop and site performance as a whole will improve.
