Technology
Daniel Kim
Director of Digital StrategyAssociation of Independent Engineering Professionals
Daniel rebuilt his association’s digital experience around a single measurement almost nobody tracks: how long it takes a member to find the one thing they came for.
Denver, Colorado
Why we love this
Why We Love What Daniel Is Doing
Most association website redesigns begin with a navigation debate. Daniel Kim started his with a stopwatch.
He sat beside eleven members, gave each of them a real task drawn from their own inbox, and timed how long it took to find the answer on the association’s website. The median was four minutes and twenty seconds. Three members never found it at all. One found a document, read it for a while, and then realized it had been superseded in 2019.
Two years later, the same task set takes a median of thirty-eight seconds. Getting there had far less to do with technology than the job title on Daniel’s door suggests.
The Challenge
The association had accumulated the thing every membership organization accumulates: eighteen years of good work, published continuously, organized by the department that produced it.
There were seven separate places a member might reasonably look for guidance on seismic retrofit standards. Four of them had something. Two of those were current. Nothing on any page indicated which was which.
“We did not have a content problem. We had a "which of these four documents should I trust" problem, and we were making every member solve it alone.”
The instinct in the building was to rebuild the site. Daniel argued for something less satisfying and more useful: fix what members actually search for first, and only then talk about design.
What They Changed
He started by reading twelve months of internal site search queries — every word members had typed into the search box and, crucially, everything they typed immediately afterwards when the first search failed.
The second query is where the real intent lives. Someone searches "PE renewal," gets nothing useful, and then searches "continuing education hours Colorado." Those two queries are the same person, thirty seconds apart, getting more specific because the system failed them.
Four changes, in the order they shipped
- Every resource got a review date and an owner. Anything unowned and older than three years was archived or refreshed — 640 items were retired in the first pass.
- Search was rebuilt to understand how engineers actually talk, mapping member vocabulary to internal taxonomy so "PE renewal" and "continuing education" reach the same shelf.
- A short, optional interest profile was added — three questions, asked once — covering discipline, licensure state and career stage.
- The member dashboard was replaced with a single "what you probably need next" panel driven by that profile plus what the member has actually opened.
Daniel is careful about the word personalization. "We are not guessing what you want. We are remembering what you told us and what you already did," he says. "Members forgive a wrong guess. They do not forgive feeling watched."
Listening to Members
The interest profile could have been a twelve-question form. Daniel’s team tested that version first and watched the completion rate collapse after question five.
They cut it to three questions and moved it to the moment a member first hits a paywall or a resource library, when the reason to answer is obvious. Completion went from 22% to 78%.
- Median time to find a resource, from 4m20s
- 38s
- Interest profile completion, from 22%
- 78%
- Outdated resources retired
- 640
- Resource downloads per active member
- 2.7×
What Happened Next
The most-cited outcome inside the association is not the search improvement. It is that the education team now knows, weekly, what members are looking for and failing to find. The failed-search report goes out every Monday morning to program staff.
Three of last year’s best-attended webinars came directly from that report — topics nobody had proposed, that hundreds of members had already asked for in a search box.
“Our members were telling us what to build every single week. We just had not been reading it.”
What Other Associations Can Learn
- Your internal site search log is the cheapest member research you will ever run, and most associations have never read one.
- Pay attention to the second search, not the first. That is where members tell you what they actually meant.
- Ask for member information at the moment it obviously helps them, not at the moment it is convenient for you to collect it.
- Retiring content is member service. Four documents on the same topic is not generosity, it is a decision you have handed to the member.
Technology matters when it helps a member get where they need to go faster.
The Member Impact
What changed for members
Members reach what they need in seconds rather than minutes, and the association now has a weekly, unfiltered signal of what its members are trying to do.
- Median time to find a resource
- 4m20s → 38s
- Resource downloads per active member
- 2.7×
- Members with an interest profile
- 78%
Beyond the numbers
- Every resource has a named owner and a review date.
- Failed member searches are reported to program staff every Monday.
- Three of the year’s top webinars originated from search data rather than committee proposals.
- Recommendations always display the reason they were shown.
“I used to keep a bookmark folder because I could never find anything twice. I deleted it last spring.”
In their words
Hear It From Daniel
Daniel Kim on reading twelve months of failed searches
5 min
Daniel explains why the second thing a member types into your search box matters more than the first, and how a three-question profile outperformed a twelve-question one.
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