How To Build A User-Focused Site Lessons Learned From Redesigning AmericanActionForum.org

Eric Wilson

Digital Director American Action Forum

New Media Exchange – September 13, 2013

Our partner on this project, Viget, deserves tremendous credit for the creativity in the solutions presented here.

AmericanActionForum.org – January 2013

Anecdotally, we knew we needed to redesign our website because…

The visual design felt dated We weren’t able to highlight content how we wanted to Our site wasn’t attracting & retaining key audiences It was difficult to find & discover relevant research

It’s important to re-cast the complaints about your current site as positive goals. Otherwise, you’ll just end up with an ‘improved’ version of your old website rather than solutions to achieve your goals.

In positive terms, we wanted our new website to

Highlight our most important, relevant content Make all of our content easier to discover Increase repeat visits and time on site Make the site visually appealing on all devices

We decided from the outset that we would achieve these goals by focusing on providing the best possible experiences for the various target audiences visiting our site.

Beyond our own opinions & anecdotal evidence, we turned to our site analytics to learn what we could improve about our site.

Our assumptions about how users were navigating the site were wrong…

56% of visits landed on an article or expert page. 80% of these visits bounced. That’s a 21% higher bounce rate than the average visit.

We were successfully driving traffic to our site through our outreach efforts (e.g. social & email), but we weren’t giving them a reason to stick around. Nor did we let them know who we are or where they were in our site.

45% of our internal site search queries were for terms that could be categorized as granular issue topics.

•  Fiscal Cliff •  Social Security •  Unemployment •  Jobs •  Sequestration

•  Medicare •  Affordable Care Act •  Medicare Advantage •  Individual Mandate •  Medicaid Expansion

Here’s what users were searching for on our site…

• Economy • Health Care

But here’s how we categorized the content.

We were imposing an information architecture on our users that made sense to us (and reflected our internal organization) – not what would help our users find the content they wanted.

Traffic from “high-value” audiences is more than twice as likely to come via email.

Mobile visits to the site grew from 8.8% in April 2012 to 15.1% in March 2013.

But this is what our site looked like on an iPhone.

CHALLENGE

Highlight our most important, relevant content.

Not every issue area we cover is always in the news. Why not let users determine (through pageviews) the issue topics we highlight?

SOLUTION

Trending Topics

SOLUTION

Trending Topics

SOLUTION

Trending Topics

SOLUTION

Trending Topics

SOLUTION

Trending Topics

CHALLENGE

Make all of our content easier to discover.

SOLUTION I

Flatter Information Architecture

A new, open taxonomy for categorizing content. Users can search & filter content based on issue topic tags. 175 unique topic tags & growing.

SOLUTION II

A Better Search Experience

SOLUTION III

New Content Types

SOLUTION III

New Content Types Additional content types – Quotes, Infographics, What We’re Reading & Serialized Products – allow us to highlight the full breadth of our content. They also enable us to highlight key research multiple times, ensuring our most important initiatives are highlighted in the news feed.

CHALLENGE

Increase the number of repeat visits and time on site.

SOLUTION I

The News Feed

Users know immediately what’s new & important. Topics & Content Types invite users to explore more content.

SOLUTION II

Related Research

SOLUTION III

Email Integration

CHALLENGE

Make the site mobile friendly

SOLUTION

Responsive Design

Tablet Breakpoint

SOLUTION

Responsive Design

Mobile Breakpoint

TESTING

We went back to our users to make sure our solutions were on the right track.

You are looking for research from the American Action Forum on Immigration. Where do you look?

74% of participants clicked on something related to research or immigration.

DIY

GetChalkmark.com Online Screenshot Testing Software by Optimal Workshop

DIY

Recruit your friends & colleagues of varying backgrounds to participate in user testing. We reached out to 100+ users representing 6 different audiences.

TESTING

And we continue to test.

Does the number of related articles at the end of a post affect the number of clicks on related research?

DIY

Optimizely Easy-to-use Multi-variate Testing

LESSON LEARNED

If there’s a disagreement over design – test it.

Do we need to call out press in the navigation?

Me: No Everybody Else: Yes

I was wrong.

79% of testers successfully completed the “find press releases” task when it was added.

LESSON LEARNED

Educate all of your team on the value of focusing on users.

Designing & building a user-focused site is only the first part of the process. The content we post each day needs to be user-focused as well.

CONTENT GUIDE EXCERPTS

“When linking to a file like a PDF from your post, indicate to the reader that the link is not a web page by putting the file type [inside brackets].” “Give your posts titles that describe the content in a compelling way and will help a user find what they are looking for if they are searching.”

LESSON LEARNED

Have confidence in your commitment to focusing on users.

Shortly before we launched, I started to panic because our site looked nothing like any other think tank website. But response has been positive. Anecdotally, users like the new site and

PROGRESS REPORT

Anecdotal feedback has been positive to date and we’ve seen some viral success. More time & traffic is needed to gather a full analytics reporting.

But here’s what I’m keeping an eye on: •  Based on internal search queries, are users finding the

content they want? •  Do too many tags on a piece of content confuse users? •  Is there a better way to deal with notation in research

that doesn’t interrupt a user’s reading flow? •  What’s the best article length to keep a user engaged?

Despite initial concerns about the navigation in user testing, our users seem to be taking to the new layout well.

Questions? ewilson@americanactionforum.org @ericwilson