Case Study
Audience-First Architecture
Association of American Medical Colleges
Product Manager, Digital Experience
Six distinct audiences shared one homepage with no clear entry points. I led a time-bound redesign that reduced first-click friction by giving each audience a clearer path into the site. I was later told the audience model went on to organize content across the whole site.
Note: The site has since been redesigned. The work shown here reflects the state of the product at launch.
The Product Decision
The core decision was to stop asking people to navigate the organization and instead ask them to identify themselves.
Rather than expanding dropdown menus, I introduced audience-first self-selection paths. People no longer had to understand how AAMC was organized before choosing where to go.
The homepage became an orientation layer, not a content index.
Key Facts
- Role
- Lead IA, digital experience
- Scope
- IA, audience routing, 4-zone model
- Team
- Led UX + UI + engineering partners
- Constraint
- Validated against CMS before visual
The Problem
Complex navigation
The menus described how AAMC was organized. A visitor arriving with an errand had to translate that structure before they could act on it.
Content overload
The homepage presented volume before hierarchy. Finding one thing meant reading past everything else.
Hidden calls to action
The primary actions were styled like the copy around them. They read as text, not as actions.
Ineffective search
Search was hard to find, and its results were loosely related. When browsing failed, nothing caught the visitor.
What the Redesign Had to Achieve
- Increase homepage engagement by 15% or more through clearer navigation.
- Improve call-to-action visibility for six distinct groups: premed students, medical students, letter writers, program directors, admissions officers, and medical educators.
- Reduce bounce rate by shortening the path to content and letting people place themselves.
- Create an information architecture that could absorb future audience needs without another rebuild.
Architecture & Interaction
The homepage was restructured around four zoning principles.
Interaction Model
The new model clarified paths before presenting volume. Navigation depth was intentionally reduced so people could reach relevant content in fewer steps. I checked the routing and content model against CMS constraints before visual refinement so implementation problems would not surface at the end.
Process
3 phases1. Research & Synthesis
This project built on existing user research. My work was to synthesize those findings, redefine the audience segmentation into six distinct groups, and map the first-click friction points for each.
The navigation reflected the organization rather than user intent. Mapping the six audience journeys made the core problem visible: the homepage was answering the wrong question.
2. Structural Prototyping
I sketched and wireframed multiple models in Sketch before any visual design began. Each approach was tested against the six audience journeys before we converged on the four-zone model.
That model defined audience routing, CTA placement, and content hierarchy. No visual execution began until those decisions had been validated.
3. Validation
Usability validation confirmed that audience self-selection reduced first-click ambiguity across all six groups. CTA click-through increased 20% and bounce rate dropped 15% during testing.
I also validated the proposed model against CMS constraints before the visual design was finalized, which prevented implementation issues from creating rework late in the process.
Impact
Usability testing showed a 20% lift in CTA click-through and a 15% reduction in bounce rate. First-click ambiguity was reduced across all six audience groups.
After I left AAMC, I was told that homepage engagement had increased 200% post-launch. I did not have access to the underlying analytics, so I treat that as a reported result rather than a metric I independently verified.
The audience model was not just a homepage fix. The same logic could extend beyond the homepage instead of making people repeatedly navigate AAMC's internal structure.
Reflection
The most important decision on this project was also the earliest one: stop organizing the homepage around what AAMC does and start organizing it around who is trying to use it.
Once that framing was settled, the rest of the work became easier to evaluate. Navigation, content hierarchy, and calls to action all had to answer the same question: does this help one of those six audiences get where they need to go?
The hard part was not deciding what the homepage should look like. It was deciding what people needed to see first.