Landing Page Optimization( A/B TESTING) | 2019
BACKGROUND
As a continuous improvement effort, The Graduate School wanted to enhance the engagement on their graduate program landing pages. The goal was to promote more user engagement and to obtain deeper site depth of prospective students seeking to enroll in a graduate program offering.
OBJECTIVE
Increase engagement on program landing pages and promote deeper site depth and with prospective students.
MY ROLE
Project Manager
UX Wireframe Designer
Content Strategist
Photographer
Web Analyst
PROCESS
We first started by gathering insight via user research and case studies in hopes to create a richer user experience. These findings informed our design process to create an effective landing page.
User Research
Through the results of higher ed ad campaign case studies, student focus groups, and user interviews - we discovered that student valued hearing from the testimonials of current students. Students revealed that a big reason why they chose Augusta University was because they sensed that AU is an environment in which they can thrive and succeed with the assistance of mentors.
Content Strategy
We strategized about what would be the most effective format for the testimonial. Through findings in case studies, we discovered that warm, genuine photos of students and mentors facing the camera were effective grabbing the attention of visitors.
We chose to create student profiles that told the background story of the student, why they chose their major, why did they choose AU and their experiences in the program. These profiles linked off from a Call-to-Action on the landing page beneath the hero image.
We worked with our program directors to gather warm and welcoming quotes to show to prospective students encouraging them to join the program.
Lastly, we limited the key benefits to short user-centric and valued-oriented.
Build & Test
We launched the design after going through an interactive design process. We launched the design into a live environment for A/B test with Google Optimize to see if the new design would get more engagement.
We tested one variant against the original design for 16 days based on the Avg. Session Duration of users.
After 16 days of testing, a clear leader was established. The variant design became the clear leader.
As a result we pushed the new design into production and utilized a similar model on the rest of our program landing pages.
Homepage Optimization | 2018
BACKGROUND
The project was to redesign the homepage of The Graduate School’s main website to improve the engagement of visitors on the homepage.
DILEMMA
It was discovered that users were not scrolling and engaging with the home page of the website. This was established by the monitoring of engagement metrics, scroll maps, feedback, and user testing.
OBJECTIVE
Increase engagement on the homepage by inviting user scrolling and browsing.
MY ROLE
Product Manager
UX Wireframe Design
Content Strategist
UX Researcher
Web Analyst
PROCESS
Via an iterative design process of mock-ups and agile design sprints with stakeholders, a solution was designed with visual affordances that promoted scroll and engaging with content .
Discovery
Through an observation of web analytics and a heat map analysis, we discovered that users where not flipping through the hero slider on the homepage or scrolling down the page see our latest events. </p> <p>This was a big desire from our leadership.
User Testing
We performed exploratory user interviews with our office staff (8 participants).
We discovered that users were not scrolling beyond the top fold or using the top slider because they did not realize that there was more on the page.We discovered that there were no visual affordances to encourage the desired action.
Design
This lead to an iterative design process with several rounds of mockups and feedback gathering from stakeholders and usability evaluations.
Solution
We added a stacked hero slider that encouraged sliding and peaked content.
We added Visual Affordances at the bottom of the top-fold to encourage scrolling.
We added a Vertical Loading Animation to demonstrate to users that there was more content to view on the homepage.
Before
After
RESULTS
A 10% increase engagement in scrolls and clicks throughout the page within a month. Web traffic to the homepage decreased by 23% (decrease contributed seasonality and visitors taking more direct paths to key pages of the site).