The Eye Bank Association of America’s (EBAA) website serves two audiences with needs on opposite ends of the spectrum: Eye banks need to be continually educated on best practices, and the public interested in cornea donation needs to be encouraged to do so. By creating an audience-centric site structure that emphasizes the stories about the benefits of cornea donations, we ensured everyone connected with EBAA’s work so they could find what EBAA needed them to see.
Kevin Corcoran
President & CEO, Eye Bank Association of AmericaServices provided
- Content Strategy
- User Experience Strategy
- Web Design
- WordPress Development
Seeing the stories of eye donation
On average, EBAA eye banks provide tissue for more than 85,000 life-changing, sight-restoring corneal transplants each year.
Through our discovery sessions with the EBAA team, it was clear that in addition to organizing member content, we had to tell the stories of the impact of eye donation and member successes. By migrating various types of content on the old site into a new structure and leveraging WordPress’ innate blog functionality, we were able to bubble up the stories throughout the site. Weaving stories across the site gives an aspirational tone to the content, reminding everyone why eye banks’ work is so important.
With custom WordPress Blocks for stories, member news, and events, the team can easily add this content to any page or post on the site. On the homepage, this also allows the top section — or hero area — to adapt to EBAA’s needs and editorial goals.
Celebrating EBAA’s work, brightly and proudly
EBAA is the world’s oldest transplant association, and eye banking has been practiced for over a century. The previous site visualized that history in a timeline, but it was locked into a plugin and challenging to update.
Using WordPress blocks, we made it easier for the team to update and have it look good on devices of all sizes.
Leading the eye with color and pattern
For a content-heavy website, photos aren’t always a necessity. EBAA had several great photos, but as we integrated their content, it became clear that we may be heading for a case where everything feels the same. We wanted to avoid change blindness across pages, which prevents readers from staying engaged in the content.
Rather than locking the team into a design relying on stock photography that can quickly grow stale, we focused on creating a light and airy design and adding visual interest with elements that draw inspiration from their logo and other collateral. We also kept the design approachable by using color, icons, original photos, and video.
We followed WCAG 2.2 recommendations for font size, color contrast, and other accessibility best practices. As EBAA is an organization focused on bringing the best possible outcomes for transplant recipients, we felt a lot of responsibility in ensuring all audience members could benefit from their work.
As we continue to work with EBAA to improve content delivery and meet their practitioners’ needs, we keep our original discovery work in mind. Remembering that design choices should make the site feel approachable, stories should be aspirational, and content must be accessible, allows the team’s decisions to be connected so that the site clearly meets its goals.
