Delivering resources, tools, best practices, and advocacy for equitable aging
Our role
design, development, editorial strategy, maintenance & support, stakeholder interviews, training
The National Council on Aging (NCOA) delivers resources, tools, best practices, and advocacy to ensure that every American can age with health and economic well-being.
The NCOA website is closely aligned with its mission. It’s a critical platform to advocate for policy, connect professionals with evidence-based programs, and reach communities with practical resources in support of equitable aging.
The NCOA website wasn’t meeting its potential for conversions or sufficiently highlighting corporate sponsors and partnership opportunities.
Navigation was often repetitive or inconsistent, and the lack of clearly established flows made it difficult to identify calls-to-action (CTAs) and fulfill visitors’ needs or meet organizational goals.
On top of that, the site was slow to load. While this would be an issue for any organization, it was especially pressing for NCOA to maintain an accessible site for older adults (and the people who support them) in rural areas with low bandwidth.
Before
After
Solutions
Working with the Alley team was a collaborative and rewarding experience. They approached every challenge with curiosity, creativity, and a problem-solving mindset, making it feel like we were one unified team rather than a traditional client-partner setup. Their dedication to understanding our needs and finding innovative solutions made a real impact on the success of our redesign.
— Bianca Pio, User Experience Specialist for NCOA
Rebuilding the front-end for a solid foundation
To be accessible and navigable for visitors, flexible and scalable for the NCOA team, and inviting to partners, the website needed a front-end rebuild.
We improved user experience and site performance using Next.js, Storybook, and Algolia search. We enhanced their existing Kontent.ai platform, focusing on consistency and flexibility so that the NCOA team could reuse components and templates more effectively.
NCOA’s Storybook design system showing examples of styled headings, and body text definitions.
Evolving the site’s look and feel
Design was getting in the way of conversions. We refined the existing modules to be more compact and purposeful, removed distracting animations, and created actionable flows with less scrolling.
To develop a cohesive design system, we updated fonts and headings for readability and visual hierarchy, refined global elements, and ensured all colors were AAA compliant.
Accessibility
Accessibility was a key measure of success for this project. We committed to accessibility in the design process (for instance, AAA compliance colors) and addressed accessibility in the development of each feature; it was part of the acceptance criteria and baked in from the beginning.
At launch, we achieved a perfect Lighthouse Accessibility score of 100.
Wayfinding
We evolved wayfinding from an audience-based navigation schema to a more topical motivation-driven approach. Today, visitors to ncoa.org are presented with four primary navigation items, each of which results in a curated dropdown menu.
This shift reminds us that personas, while useful for understanding an organization’s constituencies, are not always the best navigation prompts. It’s important to focus on the tasks—or jobs—a visitor wants to complete on a website.
We also introduced topic landing pages as a visual menu of cards with additional context. This “navigation as you need it” approach ensures people are not overwhelmed by choice too early in their journey through the site.
Search
Kontent.ai does not offer native search functionality, and the existing search experience was simply a direct word match on meta title and meta description.
To solve this, Alley introduced a third-party search tool (Algolia) to index and return relevant search results in a performant way. This solution applies to the primary search as well as custom search pages: events, press releases, and various program types.
Additionally, the Research page was transformed to a search experience to better highlight the scope of recent and relevant research conducted by NCOA.
Highlighting partnerships
Corporate partnerships contribute to NCOA’s ability to fulfill its mission. Well-known brands, like Zelle and Walmart, are eager to get involved and support the healthy aging community. Unfortunately, the website lacked the necessary templates and pathways to nurture and expand this program.
Highlighting partnerships rewards existing partners and helps potential partners envision how they might work with NCOA. We created a content type for a new partnership section to showcase these relationships through profile pages and case studies.
Supporting engagement and conversion
Another important goal of this work was engagement, specifically with newsletter sign ups and donations. To encourage conversions, we redesigned and repositioned CTA modules across the site – such as a consistent global prefooter for newsletter sign up. We also introduced an actionable right rail for articles, encouraging recirculation through related topics and related articles and conversion opportunities with new internal “ad slots” to accommodate newsletter sign ups or other high priority CTAs.
Results
The results of our work were felt immediately, with the site’s technical performance scoring higher on Google than it had in the past three years – just one hour after launch! Data on the homepage alone boasted multiple successes: render time reduced by four seconds (a 385% improvement), gains in time spent on the page, clicks on homepage links, and scroll depth.
We look forward to our continued partnership with NCOA as we seek to build on these wins and ultimately play a small role in improving the lives of millions of older adults.
Let’s talk about how we can put our talents to work for you.
