A Change of Focus
“When our employees are able to clearly define their best self, and communicate their unique voice, our company and brand really benefits”
Danielle Hughes is an expert in Personality Branding. Interested in pivoting her core business to speaking engagements and training events, she asked us for an audit of her site from a UX perspective. How can we elevate her speaking offering? Is there room for improvement? Is it conveying what it should convey? In this UX project, I teamed up with two other designers to research and recommend improvements.
OVERVIEW
Project Duration: 3 weeks, July 2022
In Partnership with: Erika McWhinnie, Deisy Lara
Responsibilities: UX/UI Design, Research
Tools: Surveys, Interviews, Figma, Photoshop
PROCESS
Discover: Competitive and Comparative Analysis, Interviews & Usability Tests, Card Sorting, Site Mapping (existing), Style Guide (existing), Heuristic Evaluation
Define: Affinity Mapping, Personas and Problem Statements, Current User Journey, Solution Statement
Develop: Card Sorting, Site Reorganization, Hi-Fi Prototype, Iteration on Findings, Usability Testing, Synthesis
Deliver: Hi-Fi Prototype, Track Metrics, Present to Stakeholder, Handoff
Let's Look at Some Competition
We conducted competitive research in Danielle’s category and found that her site is doing a pretty good job in comparison.
Where Else Can We Look?
Casting a wider net, we conducted comparative research with some well-recognized personalities in her space.
Keeping With the Look & Feel
Danielle provided us with her recently re-done Style Guide to follow.
More Analysis
We used heuristic analysis to identify usability issues that get in the way of users’ satisfaction and experience. One big takeaway was users' confusion around what “Shop” and “More” pages were offering.
Talking to Her People
Going more in-depth in interviews with actual clients of Danielle’s, we were able to see more clearly some of the frustrations users were having with the current site. We also discovered that speaking was currently #2 on perceived offerings.
Big Themes Began to Emerge
We distilled feedback from our research and interviews using affinity mapping, and a clearer picture of their experience started to form.
Two Personas, Two Problems
We created two personas to capture the needs, desires and story of both our current personality branding clients, as well as the new speaking engagement clients.
We gave them unique problem statements as well. We aimed to keep both in mind as we began ideation and design.
Brainstorming Solutions
We created some ‘how might we’ statements to kick off the creative process..
A Typical Interaction
With our users, needing and finding Danielle as a speaker for their event were the areas of focus on our current user flow.
The 10,000-Foot View
Looking at the current site map holistically, it’s easier to see that content could be trimmed and sharpened.
Sorting It Out
With a card sorting exercise, users sorted content into fairly clear categories that helped guide us in proposing a reorganization.
Trimming and Organizing
In our proposed site reorganization, we trimmed quite a bit of content and redundant imagery while sorting the content into more clearly defined categories.
Home Page Before & After
We significantly reduced the amount of content on the home page and sharpened up the definition of what Danielle is offering.
Main Offerings Before & After
The current rollover for content was confusing for users who were expecting a link. We moved the content out and added call to action buttons. After reviewing with our client, we kept the colors behind the content consistent with the photos clarify the distinct categories.
A Tidier Footer
We made the newsletter signup and footer more streamlined.
Better Product Differentiation
A single graphic with clearer buttons helped us clarify and sell the separate strategy sessions offered.
Content Bundles That Look Like More
We blew up the graphics and added descriptions and a 'video' monitor to help clarify the course bundles while making them look more enticing.
Now for the Prototype
We built a high fidelity prototype with some basic functionality and the improvements we recommended.
Testing it Out
We saw some great improvements in time and steps to complete tasks as well as what users perceived Danielle’s offerings are. Our testers now rated the user-friendliness a full point higher on average than before.
Next Steps
Danielle was very pleased with the improvements and edits we recommended and she invited us to give her a proposal on making the changes to her site.
Next steps:
• Incorporate second card sorting + conduct more user testing with actual or potential clients.
• Build out + test more pages with functionality.
• Danielle to refine + edit/update copy throughout new organization format.
• Danielle meets with her programmer to determine what is possible on the Wix platform.
• Photoshoot for new home page images.
• Danielle writes a book! ;)