Using Google analytics to redesign a homepage
Thingtesting
UX UI Designer
9 weeks
Sade Taiwo, Jenny Gyllender (CEO)
Figma
Site Map, Wireframing, High fidelity
Problem
01
Thingtesting was experiencing a fast-growth in their early stages of launch and needed to improve their UX in order to retain visitors and convert them. One of the priorities was to improve the user engagement on the homepage.
Impact
02
After the design went live, we reviewed the Google analytics:
Bounce rate decreased by -11.29%
Page per visit increased by +65.22%
Average duration increased by +21.65%
Thingtesting also saw an increase in affiliate marketing earnings. This was generated through users visiting brand sites through Thingtesting. This subsequently increased 'claimed brands' (brands that claimed their Thingtesting brand page and therefore approved the page as a verified source of reviews.
Research
03
Google Analytics
The reason the brand page was one of our first priorities to address in terms of redesigning was because when we looked at the Google analytics, we could see that the journey look like this:
Step 1: User searches for brand in Google (e.g. Heights supplements)
Step 2: User clicks on Thingtesting brand page (e.g Heights supplements brand page)
Step 3: User explores the rest of the site, the next most popular page was the brand directory
Learning: What we discovered is that users were not introduced to the site via the homepage (as they usually would with any other website). They were technically be entering the website through the backdoor and working their way around from there so we decided to prioritise the brand page and treat it as if it was the homepage.
User feedback
From this Google Analytics review we were then able to take this information to the Thingtesting community as ask them two questions:
"We can see that our brand directory page has long session times, from your experience what do you think this is?"
"We can see that our brand pages have high conversion rates, from your experience what do you think this is?"
Feedback:
Not easy to find new brands: Users felt like it was easy to find brand they knew but challenging to discover new brands and this affected the frequency of their visits to the website.
Design Process
04
Site map
The Thingtesting website was a product of multiple iterations so we worked with this site map to make sure that the flow make sense to the user regardless of what journey the user followed.
By removing the homepage which the data was telling us was a friction point, we hoped that this would allow the website to convert more users.
Highfidelity
The first page in the flow that we wanted to address was the homepage. We used components from the existing 'Brand Directory' to reconfigure the homepage using existing and popular category tags to make it easy to browse and filter.
We shared this with our feedback group and the stand out piece of feedback was:
"We like the ability to search by tailored Thingtesting categories, but I would also like the ability to search with custom terms in a search bar"
So we iterated on this design and had to do a little bit of competitive research in this phase to see what was working for other marketplace sites. We looked into Trustpilot and another review site called G2.
This solution was approved and went live and there were a few alterations that we made for the design.
We added a hover interaction to the search drop down for accessibility
We reduced the amount of categories shown in the badges and created a more curated selected based on the categories that we could see were popular. This will reduce the cognitive load on the user, hopefully making their journey smoother.
We added a 'popular' category for brands that were were not in the same category but were popular with users
Final
05
For the final design we landed on two options, the team liked both and thought there were benefits to each layout so we decided to A/B test the below screens. The goal for this page was to get the user to engage with the brand (by clicking on their URL) and ideally writing or engaging with the reviews.