AAOS Now, a monthly news magazine published by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), is the No. 1 nonpeer-reviewed orthopaedic publication and is No. 2 of all orthopaedic publications, including peer-reviewed journals, trailing only the Journal of the AAOS.* AAOS Now serves as AAOS’ primary communications vehicle with its members and is mailed to more than 27,000 orthopaedic surgeons across the United States and Canada.

The objective of this project was to transform an outdated site into a modern, user-friendly platform focused on enhancing the experience for members who enjoy reading Academy periodicals. Our collaborative team included product and business stakeholders.

Despite its mid-sized scope, the project presented several challenges, notably with the home screen design. We needed to showcase content from every department while ensuring variety without overwhelming users with clutter.

To inform our design decisions, we conducted a competitive analysis and interviewed members to understand their content preferences. Based on our findings, we introduced a “short list” component featuring five articles. The first article prominently displayed a thumbnail, title, and description, while subsequent options showed only titles to conserve vertical space.

Our goal was to streamline members navigation and decision-making processes. We empowered administrators to manually curate homepage articles offering flexibility to highlight key content as needed.

Initially, we planned individual landing pages for each subspecialty, but due to time and budget constraints, we deferred this to a future phase. Instead, we optimized the user journey by redirecting users from the home screen to a search page when they wanted to explore more articles. This page automatically filtered by department, ensuring a seamless experience. Usability tests validated this approach, confirming its effectiveness as a quick fix.

The project laid the groundwork for the AAOS Design System, named Canopy, integrating stakeholder-approved components as foundational elements. AAOS Now, benefiting from these enhancements, emerged as one of the Academy’s top-performing applications, validating the success of our efforts in improving user experience and engagement.