College of Veterinarians of Ontario

The College of Veterinarians of Ontario regulates the delivery of veterinary medicine in Ontario. All 2,300 veterinary facilities and 5,300 veterinary practitioners working within the province are required to hold a license issued by this College. With a dedication to public welfare, the College seeks to understand the risks involved in the practice of veterinary medicine and collaborates with partners to develop solutions which reduce the potential for harm to animals and people. The role and authority of the College is outlined within the Veterinarians Act and the corresponding regulations formed under this legislative framework that has been in effect since the year 1877. 

Project Summary 

CVO approached us to re-design and re-build their website. Built with Kentico 8, ten years ago, the site had outgrown its initial build and had become increasingly difficult to manage and maintain. Going into the project, CVO also had a new brand and a new vision for their website that included a user centric approach that supported the goals of their users and organization.  

Goals 

• Design and build a new website with the new CVO brand 

• Improve navigation and search (information architecture) and user experience 

• Update the CMS from Kentico 8 to the latest version of Kentico 

Scope of Work

Challenges 

The CVO website’s navigation system and site search were major pain points for users and administrators. The site relied heavily on its menu for navigation purposes and many pages had a secondary navigation that required a user to scroll down the page to view the entire menu. This combined with a site search that often gave the wrong results made it exceedingly difficult to find things on the site. 

Our Approach 

A lot of the challenges of this project came in reimagining the content with better UX. Which relates to the design as well as the navigation and search. The website had many feeds of different content types that were buried in the menu system as menu items well as within pages with long lists of links. Some of the content was also repeated because the menu system separated items by user type (for example: Public, Veterinarians) and the content was not specific to one user. Presenting this type of content not only bloated the menu but also made it hard to find anything reliably through a site search. The result of this situation made for a very text heavy website that forced users to read menus or pages of links to find what they are looking for.  

We started from the ground up in our approach; analysing the pages metrics, key user and organizational goals and revised the site map and organization of content. Completely restructured the menu system, we consolidated and removed pieces and focused on nurturing the user journeys with a clear and concise menu system with no overlap between sections and designed an expanded mega menu that accommodated descriptive text to help with wayfinding. 

Once we had done our information architecture work, we were able to clearly map the user journeys of the main user groups, which opened the space for a more interactive and visual design.  

The issue with the search was not isolated to the actual functionality of the search on the site, but rather a result of poor information architecture, no filtering capabilities and being too broad. To remedy this, we designed and developed a series of distinct pages with filtered searches that allowed feeds of content to exist in one place.   

Kentico 13’s Smart search was used extensively with custom tables to allow us to build filtered searches within the site that were specific to the content type. The custom tables included the filters for the page type and were used to connect with the searches. Examples of this can be seen in the Publications, Standards, Consultations, Events, Discipline Orders, Hearings and Resources page feeds. 

Results 

The new CVO website is an overwhelming success! Users and administrators are finding the website easy to navigate and the restructuring of content and visual approach to design has cemented the website as the focal point of the college’s new vision and brand. The upgrade to Kentico 13 has been well received by content editors citing it as both intuitive and effective in making content editing easy and even fun!