How Ecumen Made It Easier for Families to Find the Right Senior Living Community
Redesigned community locator and blog hub drove a 248% traffic surge in the first month
Introducing the Story of Ecumen
Ecumen is one of the largest and oldest non-profit senior housing and services organizations in the United States, operating more than 70 communities across Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Idaho. Its services span independent living, assisted living, memory care, hospice, and at-home care, guided by a mission to help older adults live the life they choose, wherever they call home.
For the thousands of families researching senior living options each month, Ecumen's website is often where that decision begins.
The Challenge
Ecumen helps families navigate one of the most emotionally complex decisions of their lives: choosing where a loved one will live. But the digital tools meant to help them weren't keeping pace.
The "Find a Community" locator was functional but clunky — families had to work too hard to compare care options near them. And the blog, meant to be a resource hub, was presented in a dense masonry grid with no way to filter by topic or interest.
The internal team knew it needed work. The challenge was modernizing both tools without disrupting a site serving thousands of users every month.
The Scope
- UX audit of the Find a Community locator and blog hub
- Find a Community locator redesign — filtering, results display, search flow
- Blog hub redesign — static masonry grid to filterable, interactive widget
- Delivered as part of Ecumen's ongoing support retainer
Why Ecumen Chose O8
O8 has partnered with Ecumen since 2019, beginning with a large-scale migration of 28 websites onto a unified WordPress multisite network, and continuing through years of ongoing digital marketing and web support.
That history meant O8 already understood Ecumen's site architecture, content structure, and the day-to-day realities of supporting a network serving thousands of families every month. When friction points emerged in the Find a Community locator and blog, addressing them through the existing support retainer, rather than scoping a new project from scratch, was the natural next step.
How O8 Responded
O8 tackled two targeted UX improvements as part of Ecumen's ongoing support retainer, both launching May 15, 2026.
Find a Community — Locator Page Overhaul
We redesigned the community locator to be faster and more intuitive for families comparing senior living options. The updated experience includes cleaner filtering, more scannable results, and an interface built around how people actually search — not just how data gets organized internally.
Blog — From Static Grid to Interactive Widget
The blog went from a basic masonry-style display to an interactive content hub with filterable categories. Readers can now drill into the topics that matter most to them — memory care, independent living, wellness, Ecumen news — without scrolling through unrelated posts.
The Results
Find a Community — nearly 3.5x more engagement in the first month post-launch:
In the two weeks before the May 15 launch (May 1–14), the Find a Community page received 803 page views. In the first month post-launch (May 15–June 14), it received 2,794 — a 248% increase. The page went from a mid-tier destination to one of the most consistently visited pages on the site.
Blog hub — 85% lift in index traffic:
The blog hub went from 179 views pre-launch to 331 post-launch — an 85% increase, suggesting the new filterable widget is drawing readers in rather than sending them elsewhere.
The Ecumen team felt it:
Internal stakeholders called out the blog redesign as a significant improvement and praised the locator's enhanced usability.
Why It Worked
This wasn't a full rebuild — it was precise, targeted work applied where the gap between user intent and experience was widest. O8 identified the two pages where people were most likely to make a real decision (find a community, find helpful content) and rebuilt both to get out of their way.
When UX matches what people are actually trying to do, engagement follows naturally.
