American Physical Therapy Association gets new user functionality
Creating a member-centric experience across the United States. A practical guide to building an impressive site.
Digital Flexing
Serving over 100,000 members with a goal to promote better physical therapy, the American Physical Therapy Association, APTA, play a vital role in the advancement of physical health.
APTA was on a mission to create a new digital experience for its members by implementing new user functionality and piecing together a powerful content platform that could support their large membership base. It was down to Optimizely’s Gold Partner, Blend Interactive, to ensure the implementation took place successfully.
Taking existing design mocks, requirements, and technical specifications, Blend was tasked with creating a full technical plan — essentially, a blueprint for the Optimizely installation. They set about this through an iterative scoping project, where requirements were spelled out a bit at a time and prioritized for both budget and minimum viable product.
The goal was to keep surprises to a minimum by providing ongoing updates to the overall budget and decisions that might affect that budget.
Partnership Through a Dream Team
Blend was provided early-stage strategic direction by APTA’s agency-of-record, but this wasn’t a case of simply following directions. The three parties were united and engaged toward interpreting that strategic direction in a way that worked best with APTA’s new Optimizely install. Throughout the project, Blend provided expertise in concert with the marketing goals and editorial expectations of APTA’s team. Wireframes were reviewed with Optimizely’s capabilities in mind and adjusted accordingly.
Flexibility Through Product Ownership and Iterative Training
Iterative scoping and development is more than just following a document — it also requires an organic look at each phase. The implementation process includes ongoing training. Rather than train in one big chunk at the end, training was spaced in the attempt to provide all of the pieces to create specific sections of the site instead of everything at once.
Optimizely Content Cloud provides APTA the scalability to reach more members via a digital platform that’s inclusive to all. The platform delivers capabilities that enables the team to monitor content performance for its audience.
Whether it's upcoming events, courses or educational content, the site serves as an important engagement hub for the organization and its audience.