Case Studies

Client:

OSU Medical Center, Center for Continuing Medical Education (CCME)

Summary:

The Center for Continuing Medical Education is a world leader in providing medical education for doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals worldwide. CCME provides ongoing education by providing a variety of learning opportunities including live streaming webinars, recorded webinars, online resources, conferences, and grand rounds.

Problem:

The staff at CCME had been using a system developed over the course of several years. CCME continued to add new features to the site and as the site grew it became difficult for the staff to manage. As with many legacy applications, pieces of the site were not communicating with each other which caused additional data entry and often confusion as administrators were unable to perform key tasks efficiently. The site also required a significant amount of time to support each month. Thus, CCME was determined to provide some major enhancements to its clients and wanted to raise the quality of the services they provided. The only option was to completely rebuild the site; however, rebuilding the site produced another problem. The site had over 29,000 users and eight years of historical data that had to be maintained for accreditation reasons. Many users needed data on the site to comply with their professional certifications.

Solution:

Switchbox worked closely with the staff at CCME to determine the current and future needs of the site. Key areas for both users and administrators were identified and built into a completely new system. An important goal was to make all the different pieces of the site “globally-aware” of the other sections. User information needed to be updated across all areas of the site, videos needed to be automatically updated and archived, and hospital administrators needed to have greater control over their users. The site also needed to be migrated to newer hardware to increase performance and handle additional users.

Results:

The site was completely redeveloped and upgraded to meet the new functional requirements. SCG Design was engaged to create a new visual layout and to provide guidance on the user interface and enhance the overall look and feel to both the clients and staff. The existing streaming video system was upgraded and fully integrated into the new site. Switchbox also coordinated the new site architecture with several IT departments at OSU Medical Center and provided additional support during the transfer.

Client:

The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions

Summary:

The Buckeye Institute has been working hard to provide more accurate, meaningful, and transparent data about government to Ohio citizens.

Problem:

The previous site became extremely outdated and was providing very little new information to users. As a result, the interest in the site dropped dramatically and few new visitors were staying on the site to learn more. The organization needed a completely new approach to excite existing users and to attract new visitors. The Buckeye Institute had very little time and resources, so something drastic needed to be done quickly.

The President, Matt Mayer, came up with a vision for a site that included daily updates, new articles, video, links to social media, and much needed data. One major problem was that there were very few staff members who would be able to manage the new features, so these features needed to be easy-to-use.

Solution:

Switchbox worked closely with the Buckeye Institute to determine the features on the site that would generate the most interest. Each feature was carefully designed to be easy to update and easy to find. Everything from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and user functionality was factored into the new redesign. Additional areas for content were added and an easy-to-use backend was created for each staff member to use.

A new feature was implemented at the direction of Mayer. Data was collected, condensed, and formatted from multiple government agencies and was loaded onto the site. Five separate databases were created to house the additional data and the web servers were upgraded to handle the additional traffic. A new search feature was created to allow public citizens to search the data and a marketing campaign was developed to drive traffic to this new feature.

Results:

The site redesign was an incredible success. Visits to the site increased from around 15 per day to a peak of over 8,000 (a 53,300% increase) within one week of launching the site. Over 40,000 new visitors from all 50 states and 54 countries signed up to use the new tool within the first two months. Visitors spent over 5,000 hours viewing and using the new search features with each visitor spending over seven minutes on the site within weeks. Before the redesign of the site, very few new visitors returned; but after the new site launch, four out of every five visitors returns to the site.