WBE Home Page Redesign
Background
Website builder expert WBE is an affiliate marketing site with nearly 500 keywords ranking first on Google search engine. It was a new acquisition back in 2019. The team was working on a mission to make the website one of the million dollar portfolio.
I was brought into the WBE team due to my vast experience in publishing and product background. My mission was to educate the team that content is our product here. And to lead them towards optimizing content consumption experience for the users rather than just focusing narrowly on the conversion rate optimisation.
Strategic Shifts
Team WBE has so far only used design as a problem solving tool rather than considering it as a strategic pillar in getting 1 million dollars mark.
Agile way of working was still a new concept to most of the publishing teams, including WBE team and thus collaboration & information sharing on big projects was an uphill battle.
These mindset shifts were the key reasons for introducing Design Sprint to team WBE.
Team WBE
Team WBE photoshoot. Showing experts behind the brand to promote Expertise, Authority & Trust (EAT). We are a team of trustworthy experts and not a one man band run from a garage somewhere.
Issues With Current WBE Page
Content Canibalisation
Since a lot of the home page contents were a repetition from other pages on WBE, it was competing to rank on google with its own sub pages. Consequently taking away the valuable traffic and negatively impacting on our performance matrics like Free/Premium sign up rate for affiliate products.
Vertical Expansion
The old home page was solely focused on 'Website Builders' vertical only. When people land onto the home page, it did not have any entry point into other verticals such as 'Website hosting' and 'Bespoke Website Design' services and other verticals. Thus causing higher bounce rate & lower time on site.
Trust Signals
Based on the research conducted on the Home page, we came to understand it lacked an element of TRUST. Many users said it felt like a scam website. Others thought it was un-professional due to the fact that they could not navigate to the content they want with ease.
Expertise & Authority
Based on our findings, home page was a missed opportunity to promote our experts behind each intensively researched articles. Although we relied heavily on industry research and product research, we failed to link back to those authoritative contents.
How might we future proof the WBE home page?
It was the key question that we tried to address during our 3 hour design sprint conducted with the business owners, product manger, content writers, designer and engineers. Since it is a cut down version from usual 5 day sprint, a lot of pre-work on research, problem framing were done before the design sprint with all the team members being involved.
PS: WBE Home Page project was first ever project at MVF using Design Sprint to solve the hefty business challenges.
Our 3 hour design sprint covered the following:
1 – Agreeing on the problem definition
2 – Lightning talks by the key business functions (Content/Design/PM)
3 – Ideation/ divergent thinking on possible solutions
4 – Voting/ prioritising on the initiatives to work on
5 – Crazy 8 sketches
Mid-fi/hi-fi wireframing and user testing took place separately after the 3 hour design sprint.
How Might We - HMW
Through our How Might We session, after the important lightning talks, we generated many ideas that were relevant to improve our WBE Home Page.
Affinity Mapping
All the ideas we generated were grouped into relevant categories. And the relevant tasks were dot voted for prioritising and deciding which ones to tackle first.
Crazy 8
After the affinity mapping and dot voting, we agreed to work on ideas for home page above the fold value proposition. We did our eight sketches and picked a winning variation by dot voting on them.
Wireframing & User Testing
The winning variation from crazy 8 was developed further into mid-fi and high-fi mock ups. We did a few user testing sessions to mitigate any usability issues and iterated a couple of times before the design was passed onto UI team for pixel perfect prototyping.
Follow Ups
The design sprint ended at the stage where we decided winning idea for WBE above fold value proposition. We deep dived into conversational UX.
Design team and the content team did follow up content workshops and came up with ideas about how to improve EAT for the home page based on Google’s best practices advice.
The following is a low fidelity wireframe that addresses most of the issues identified in the discovery stage.
Content items chosen to positively impact on EAT.
1 – Making sure the team behind the WBE project is front and center
2 – Promoting values and mission of WBE
3 – Including testimonies from our users
4 – addressing pain points through FAQ section
Content Canibalisation
The issue is addressed through a well thought out content strategy for the home page.
Vertical Expansion
With new content blocks like 'We Can Help You With...' section, we created opportunities for new vertical expansion.
Trust Signals
Thew new page has multiple trust signals like team section, author bio, testimonials & FAQ sections.
Expertise & Authority
By brining out the experts behind the brand, we made WBE more authoritative and trustworthy.
Learnings & Outcomes
It was proven through WBE project that big ambitious challenges like Home Page redesign can be solved very quickly with Design Sprint.
Due to the collaborative nature of Design Sprint, the WBE team members became allies for evangelising Design Sprint at MVF.
The success in this project led me to organise lunch and learn session for Design Sprint education at MVF for other business functions guest speakers from Google.