The Ohio Society of CPAs partners with the accounting professionals to advance the state of business so Ohio can enjoy a healthy and sustainable economic environment. The Ohio Society of CPAs represents 85,000 CPAs and accounting professionals who are the strategic financial advisors to Ohio’s leading businesses. With experience with public, private, and non-profit organizations, they work with business leaders and policy makers to help with initiatives like fair and predictable tax environments within Ohio.
The Ohio Society of CPAs came to Switchbox wanting to update and enhance their existing public facing website, which eventually lead to a complete reimagining of their member-facing education portal.
The Ohio Society of CPAs had years of disjointed updates to their public-facing website that lead to cluttered and unintuitive experience for their users. Which had lead to the graphic design of the website to become stale and out of date since its initial release many years prior. The member-facing portal was run by a third party service that were not capable of providing a consistent experience or design, and it was an overly complex system and generally hard to use for both the user and administrators. This lead for an overall poor reflection of the quality and trust of the organization affords its members.
Switchbox engaged in numerous meetings to understand the issues that members face registering and using the educational portal, and what the goals of OSCPA were, and how they could be achieved. Frequent meetings with OSCPA stakeholders warhead to ensure the design exceeded their expectations and solves the problems that were communicated. The Switchbox team made sure to establish a new, improved, and consistent design language and workflow that easily guides users through the public-facing content, but that would also be helpful and easy to understand in the member portal portion as well.
A main goal was to improve the overall aesthetic appeal of the website, since the design was outdated since it was originally launched. The focus of the visual branding was to maintain familiarity with the established brand so as to not alienate existing members or users and reinforce the quality and professionalism members have come to expect from the organization, while also increasing member engagement and attract new members via the public-facing website.
Another solution the Switchbox and OSCPA team worked towards was to ensure all online services and platforms are effective and consistent across all screen sizes and devices, whether that be mobile or desktop. And working closely with the developers to ensure the design and experience complemented the available functionality provided by the third party APIs.
The OSCPA website redesign project successfully achieved the objectives of improving user experience, member engagement, and access to resources. By adopting modern design principles, enhancing functionality, and brining the software and services up to modern standards, OSCPA has positioned itself to better serve its members and attract new ones. The ongoing commitment to updates through user-collected feedback ensures the website will continue to evolve and see t the needs of its audience in the future.
