This Wednesday we had about 20 or people come and test the site I have been working on: unamidelaware.com.
The results were interesting, but mostly along with what I expected. As with anytime I design a Web site (or write an article, or cook a meal…) I am aware of things I wish I did but just didn’t have the time or capability to do so.
For example ,many complained over the buggy-ness of the Flash slideshow. The slideshow was a cheap tool that I purchased because I did not have the expertise to code it myself. But a quick run down of the complaints and what we are doing to change them.
- Right rail navigation is poor, roll overs shouldn’t be a way to navigate to articles
- There is no indication that this is a Delaware related page
- The video player is not very inviting
- Our “stories we wish we wrote” is the only text on home page, and it misleads users to believe that its our main content
- We are having major IE7 problems due to the JS-Kit comment system. This is not to say that s the fault of the script, but it may not be playing nice with whatever other scripts we have going.
- There is no real “information hierarchy” to our site. This is because 1. There is no CMS, and 2. We are only putting out one article a day.
- People clicked on videos
- Our learn/connect/multimedia box was confusing as it was before the article
I’m at work with some changes, but this test essentially proved to me:
- Videos are the next big thing for news, but they have to be presented inline with the article
- The image first mindset doesn’t exist. People want to be able to digest information quickly by skimming and text allows that
- You need a CMS, without question
- People still like to browse by categories, date, and topics
- Users aren’t that impressed by links to other related Web sites
- The cleaner, the better.
The old design (left) vs the new (right):
2 Comments
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Hey Sean, I like your list of “this test essentially proved to me,” but the items on your list would be more meaningful to your audience (well, me, at least) if you wrote why / how those items were proven.
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Well, in a nut shell:
Video proved successful by simple metrics. A lot users clicked the videos and thought they added to the whole experience.
We featured image based navigation that got very negative responses that it was counter intuitive. Our theory was that curiosity would spark exploration of the navigation. We were wrong, people looked for text.
You need a CMS because uploading articles in HTML is incredibly time consuming and your hours to articles ratio is terrible.
People in the test and that we showed the site to instinctively looked for standard navigation like categories. Another reason a CMS is needed: to automatically create that taxonomy for you.
Links were seen as clutter and extraneous by all the users. They wanted to read the article first, and click links second. Thus if I had time to design a new article page Id move the links down.
Clean design is seen as cool and modern so it can support your (hopefully) cool and modern content.
Hope that helped Joe.