Big Wins with Quick Changes
By Ryan Carson @ryancarson
22 July 2010 | Category: Uncategorized
Once you've launched a site, the most important thing to do is be ready and poised to completely change it. Reacting very quickly to real-world feedback can turn unseen problem areas into strengths.
I wanted to share a real-world example with you of how we recently did this on a project of ours.
I wireframed the Library page on Think Vitamin Membership and I thought I did a pretty good job. It was going to be bold, clear and constantly updated with new content.
I chose to use large blocks for the videos because I felt the visitors attention would be drawn to the two latest videos, which was the most important goal of the page (I believed at the time).
I chose to list the Course categories down the right side with an accordion-style menu. We also had the ubiquitous search bar as well.
Here’s the wireframe (which I did in Mockingbird) …
Wireframe
Completed design
Listening and Making Immediate Changes
The problem is we starting immediately getting a lot of feedback from people saying things like …
- They couldn’t find new videos that were posted
- It appeared as if the page never changed
- It wasn’t obvious the breadth of courses we offered
The first thing I had to do was squash my ego and admit there was an immediate problem with the design. This wasn’t Mike’s fault (our designer). The problem was the original wireframe.
So Mike and I sat down and I explained the feedback and how I thought we could fix it. I didn’t bother to do a formal wireframe – we just sketched a few things on a piece of paper. Here’s the new design (which you can see live here):
The specifics
This ‘New Today’ button immediately makes it clear this video has been uploaded today.
This ‘New This Week’ button again, makes it clear that the video has been uploaded very recently. The color shift from green to orange also visually denotes this difference.
We added a new simple horizontal menu which lists our courses. It’s very obvious now which courses we offer, instead of hiding the list away on the right side of the page.
We added a simple way for people to keep up to date on all the latest videos by bringing the Twitter and RSS feed to the top of the page. This was previously tucked away at the bottom of the right hand side of the page. The RSS feed is pumped to the Twitter account so it’s automatically updated.
Done in a Day
The greatest thing about this change is that it took about 24 hours to do. Mike did the design work in about eight hours and then our developer coded it up in about three hours.
I believe the important take-away here is that this re-design didn’t take long. We didn’t have a drawn out process to get this done. We listened to our users, reacted quickly and deployed the fix.
Are there any reactive changes you can make to your site today?
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