Ohio Board of Nursing: nurses start from their role, not from a stack of PDFs

The Ohio Board of Nursing licenses and certifies registered, practical and advanced practice nurses, medication aides, dialysis technicians, community health workers and doulas: more than 300,000 licenses and certificates by the Board’s count in 2022. Its priorities, in its own words, are to license the nursing workforce efficiently and to remove dangerous practitioners from practice in a timely manner to protect Ohio patients. nursing.ohio.gov serves both: nurses start there to apply and renew, students look up the NCLEX, employers verify a license, and the public files complaints and reads disciplinary actions.

In 2022 much of what those people needed sat in PDFs. When the Board asked to move its site onto the State’s InnovateOhio Platform, its own list ran to more than 200 of them, from licensing and continuing education to the NCLEX, military and veterans, forms and discipline records, and the new site had to go live in phases between September 2022 and January 2023.

In 2025 the State began moving its websites from HCL Digital Experience to a new Contentful-based platform. The Board used the move to ask more of its site: simpler navigation and a better experience for the people who use it.

2022: Deciding, document by document, what people needed

We ran content rationalization sessions with the Board’s content owners to decide, for each PDF, whether it stayed a document, became a web page, or was rebuilt as a digital form on Form.io, the State’s form builder. We converted the PDFs chosen for the web into pages and built the digital forms.

2022: A structure tested before it was built

We built a new information architecture and a clickable prototype, on desktop and on mobile, validated the structure with a tree test, and built the home and section pages on the platform. We ran a Section 508 validation before launch, and the site went live on December 15, 2022; the rest of the content followed in phases through January 2023, including a For the Public page for people outside the profession. We trained the Board’s authors and supported the site through February 2023.

2025: Research with the people who use it

For the move to Contentful we started again from the people: focus groups in May 2025, a discovery research report, and a content audit and strategy for the whole site. We tested a clickable prototype, on desktop and on mobile, in usability sessions from July to September 2025.

2025: A home page that starts with your role

We designed a new structure with five sections, from Licensing & Certification to Complaints & Regulations, and a home page that asks one question: “Select your role.” Each of eight roles, from registered nurse to doula, opens its own page; the registered nurse page, for example, gathers education requirements, how to apply, fees and the renewal schedule, continuing education, discipline and how to verify a license. Popular tasks, such as verifying a license or managing an application, sit below.

2025: Onto the State’s next platform

We configured the Board’s Contentful environment and content model, built the landing pages, and migrated the content from HCL, with the Board’s documents moved to the State’s Cloudinary asset library. System and user acceptance testing came next, then training for the Board’s team in September and October 2025 and the cutover in late 2025.

Since late 2025, a nurse who comes to nursing.ohio.gov picks a role on the home page and lands on one page with what that license needs, from the renewal schedule to continuing education. Employers and the public reach license verification, complaints and disciplinary actions from every page, and the Board’s own team runs the site on the State’s Contentful platform.

It is the second time we rebuilt the site. The first, in 2022–2023, took the Board’s content out of PDFs and onto the InnovateOhio Platform in phased releases; in 2023 the site took the State’s new “Ohio, The Heart of it All” brand in the platform-wide rollout we led. The second, in 2025, moved it to Contentful and Next.js and organized it around the people who use it.

We ran both projects for the Board, from research to go-live, on the State’s platform.