Distinguishing Signal from Noise

Context

IFT is a professional membership organization serving food scientists across industry, academia, and government. When they reached out to Rightpoint knowing they needed to innovate their digital presence, they didn’t have a clear set of goals for what that innovation should accomplish. Stakeholder priorities varied significantly across functions, existing research was fragmented across multiple documents, and the organization’s members spanned career stages and professional contexts with meaningfully different needs.

Getting this right would determine IFT’s digital direction for the fiscal year and Rightpoint’s continued relationship with the client. However, stakeholders had strong opinions shaped by their own functions, and existing member data sat in disconnected documents that hadn’t been synthesized into a shared picture. Without clear objectives, there was no neutral ground.
The risk wasn’t just a bad recommendation, but a strong recommendation that couldn’t get buy-in because no one had established what success even looked like.

Leadership

As the lead UX representative, I started by synthesizing what already existed, including a member survey, community observations, readership data, analytics, and branding guidelines, before conducting four stakeholder interview sessions across eleven people spanning the CFO, EVP, VP of Government Relations, Editor-in-Chief, and Directors across marketing, sales, learning, and member relations.

Rather than averaging stakeholder priorities, I listened for business direction and growth intent, then identified themes that resonated across multiple groups and weighted them against organizational common ground. I also wanted to pressure test what I was hearing with users, so I attended IFT’s annual conference to observe member behavior directly.

Findings

The research surfaced three problems that were hiding in plain sight, each more specific and actionable than stakeholders had anticipated.

• The organization’s language didn’t match how members thought
  Across user types and career stages, members consistently couldn’t find what they were looking for because site labels didn’t match their mental models. Users weren’t lost because the content was missing. They were lost because the words pointing to it weren’t theirs.
• Search isn’t just a usability problem, it’s a trust issue
  A single bad experience was enough to change how members navigated the whole site. When search failed, users abandoned it entirely for the rest of the session. A tool that should have been a safety net ended up as a liability.
• Features reduce friction
  Observed behavior at the annual conference and search failure patterns from usability testing pointed to the same need: reduce the obstacles between members and the information they came for.

Impact

The research gave IFT a clear direction where none had existed. The mobile recommendation was greenlit, leading to a second phase of usability testing to validate and refine the experience.

Search findings were significant enough to stand on their own. The trust pattern uncovered in testing, where failed searches changed how users navigated the entire site, made a compelling case for a dedicated project, which Rightpoint was contracted to lead in parallel.

The work on this project ultimately led to Rightpoint becoming the Agency of Record for IFT, supporting their digital needs across multiple technology initiatives.