Distinction improved the UX for the Society & College of Radiographers (SCoR)

As part of an expansive business transformation, the Society & College of Radiographers (SCoR) approached Distinction with their vision to improve their members’ experience, starting with both the Society and the College’s digital presence.

SCoR is the trade union/professional body and registered charity respectively for radiographers and all non-medical members of the workforce in diagnostic imaging and radiotherapy in the UK.
It is responsible for their professional, educational, public, and workplace interests. Founded in 1920, SCoR is one of the oldest and most experienced radiography organizations in the world.

The Brief

The first phase of the organization’s digital transformation focused on its web presence which needed to match the high, professional, and modern standards they expect the sector to follow. The current website was dated and very text-heavy, challenging to navigate with the inconsistent layout and a huge number of subpages, and experienced a high bounce rate as users couldn’t find what they were looking for.

Summary

The discovery phase revealed the need for two separate websites – one for the Society and one for the College – where the content was personalized according to the user and members could use one set of login credentials to access everything their membership offered.
The project included migrating their CMS from Drupal to Kentico Xperience, developing integration with their CRM (Stratum by APT), and implementing a single sign-on (SSO) so they could integrate with their other third party platforms, i.e. extranet, events platform, shop, and e-learning.

User-Centric Discovery

Distinction starts every project with a discovery phase to really get to the heart of what users want and need. For SCoR, this involved workshops with internal and external stakeholders to gather qualitative insights. Surveys were followed to gather quantitative data.

Discovery workshops were held with each team that represented the main areas of SCoR: education, practitioner, a membership success team, and sales and marketing.

Understanding their needs and internal processes allowed Distinction to map out the customer journey with a cross-departmental user flow that included every on and offline touchpoint to inform UX design.

Aligning Fragmented Stakeholders

Distinction knew from experience that aligning stakeholders is key to a project’s success, especially a complex digital transformation program for an organization that has c30,000 members, from a large national base, and across multiple medical disciplines.

In addition, the Society and College had separate identities and leadership teams so getting feedback and ensuring there was equal representation within the design and user journey was challenging. But in the end, Distinction and their client had a joined-up leadership team with a clear project outcome that helped towards SCoR’s ultimate goal of total digital transformation.

CMS migration

SCoR’s legacy CMS – Drupal – needed to be migrated to Kentico Xperience (DXP). Not only does Xperience give the SCoR marketing team a superior content editing experience, but it also has an extensive marketing functionality with features such as content personalization, email marketing, and analytics. This meant SCoR’s digital marketing strategy could be implemented and managed from one place by a distributed workforce and content governance was easy to control.

Self-Serve User Experience

The old site had limited self-service for visitors to apply for membership and for members to manage their membership online so making sure the new sites had this functionality was a big part of the vision to transform members’ digital experience.

The new site has a vastly improved interface, information architecture, navigation, and search function, so relevant content is served up consistently with members able to easily find the guidance and support they’re looking for.

Now members no longer have to log into multiple platforms (CRM, CPD, event software, payment gateway, and website) – everything they need for their profession and studies is accessible through a single sign-on.

Multiple Integrations

Giving members a seamless user experience meant a number of third-party integrations needed to be made.
Distinction’s discovery phase identified all the data points and mapped every user journey. It was time to pull everything together to give SCoR’s members the exceptional experience they deserved.

Firstly, they integrated with SCoR’s CRM so that member data could be pushed to the CRM and replicated back into the CMS via a two-way sync so members could update their accounts online and be prompted when their membership was up for renewal.

The claims-based authentication tool, Auth0, was integrated to give members an SSO, allowing them to access the website, CPD portal, extranet, and event management system from one set of login credentials.

For the sections of the site that needed a more customized approach than the existing Kentico Azure Search integration would allow, Distinction built a bespoke Azure search integration. And integrating World Pay as a payment gateway was required to take payments for events.

UX & UI Design

During the design research process, creation of the design concepts, and working with the branding to identify a unique visual identifier for SCoR, Distinction’s UX/UI designer was inspired to design a circle graphic.

The idea came from looking at one picture, in particular, that of a MIR machine, in which circles were identified within the machine. After playing around with this idea, a circle graphic was created that is now featured throughout the site.

Circles appear a lot throughout radiography – in the machines and scanners themselves when carrying out certain procedures (focal spots on X-rays and radiography treatment), and the joining up of governance and clinical practice is a circular approach rather than a linear one.

This cemented the circle idea and in turn, created the circle theme that you’ll see throughout the site’s UI in terms of backgrounds and icons.

Outcome

The rebuild of the SCoR sites has given the Society and College the opportunity to showcase their updated branding and modernised the look and feel of a 100-year-old institution.

With the simplified structure, users can find content more easily which has reduced bounce rates on the site.

Comparing the first half of the site launch (June-August 2021) with the second half (August-October 2021), SCoR enjoyed:

Phase one of the digital transformation met its goal of improving member experience and Distinction continues to work with SCoR to deliver their change program.

About Distinction

Distinction is the digital product studio who’ll make you stand out. They work with clients to disrupt their sector, challenge the competition, and capture market share by delivering experiences users love.