As a service to its members’ continuing education efforts, the CFA Institute (formerly the Association for Investment Management and Research) provides an online Professional Development (PD) Diary. Members can track selected activities that the Institute enters automatically and also manually enter their own activities such as readings or attendance at seminars. A year after its initial launch, the Institute asked Dynamic Diagrams to evaluate the PD Diary and make its interface more inviting and efficient.

The PD Diary already contained all of the features users needed to document their accomplishments. However, some of the CFA Institute’s professional development guidelines were not implicit in the interface (e.g., credits from a single activity may be distributed among multiple years, two credits must also satisfy an ethics requirement). Users who accessed the site's Help pages for assitance had to sift through documentation for the larger CFA Institute Web site to find information specific to the Diary. The end result was an experience that was sometimes confusing, particularly to those who only used the Diary occasionally.

Following our analysis of the site and its functional requirements, we conducted a round of usability testing with CFA Institute members. The testing provided a wealth of feedback for improving the site, ranging from the editorial to the procedural. In addition to a list of recommended improvements to the interface, we also identified elements that users liked that shouldn’t be changed.

The interface redesign flowed naturally from our recommendations. We added a brief introduction to using the Diary, reworded form labels, and incorporated contextual help links into each page. We also added new navigational menus and designed a format for presenting confirmation and error messages to give users feedback as they used the site’s forms.

Once the design was accepted, we coded a full set of sample pages for CFA Institute developers to use to engineer the site, incorporating the Institute's new branding guidelines in the process. The result is an updated PD Diary that will be more attractive and more useful to CFA Insitute members.