ACPEN Catalog User Interface Design

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In 2012, the Accounting CPE Network had grown from a course offering of 24 webcasts a year, to an annual catalog of over four hundred courses annually. This lead to a end user catalog that was extremely over crowded. The original ACPEN catalog was made without much consideration to user interface (not by me!) as a simple dynamic site that output the relevant course into, mostly in dynamic tables. This simple catalog (seen on the right) was fine when it contained only 24 courses.

However, as the network grew, more and more courses were added, with increasing complexity of the offerings. Now the courses were not only on different dates and times, but some were offered at night, others on weekends. Some were part of packages that could be purchased at a discount, while others were not. As technologies moved from desktop to mobile, some courses were available for mobile and ipad viewing, while others that had be encoded with older codecs, where not.

These, along with a number of other issues lead to catalog that needed to be re-designed. The new catalog would need to make it easier to navigate different areas of study, skim through the extensive information with a much improved visual hierarchy, differentiate between different types of courses (such as live webcasts vs. on-demand self-study), convert some of the text to icons to reduce the amount of text, and many other improvements.

Though I was very pleased with the improvements made, to the user experience, I’m afraid you can no longer find it on the web, as in 2015 ACPEN moved to a new ASP, that utilized its’ own catalog front end. But you can still see the considerable re-design via the mock-ups below!