Redesigning Usabilla.com
A much needed update of Usabilla's main website to improve work flows & content discovery.
Work carried out with partial assistance from Concept7.
Acted as project manager, UX designer, and copywriter.
Skills used:
- Requirement capturing
- User interviews & surveys
- Task analysis
- Wireframing
- Journey Mapping
- User feedback gathering & analysis
- Competitor Analysis
The Challenge
After 5 years of use, Usabilla's website was beginning to look badly outdated – bad for a company that prides itself as an authority on UX. Over the years content had been liberally added in such a way that the website no longer provided a valuable nor intuitive experience.
The aim of the redesign was threefold:
- Provide a uniform – responsive – experience across all devices.
- Increase website conversion, bounce rates, and solidify Usabilla's brand.
- Cement Usabilla as an authority in UX design by building a user-centric experience that met current best practices
1. Defining requirements (feedback analysis)
- Feedback from site visitors had been continually collected over the past 3 years via Usabilla for Websites.
- Analysing this feedback shows us the website's main pain-points & suggestions from visitors on what they want.
- Provided a number of focus points for us to take forward into the new design.
2. User Interviews
- Current Usabilla customers contacted through telephone interviews.
- Use the prior user feedback as a starting point.
- Allows us to understand what users want to see on Usabilla's website and position it accordingly.
3. Competitor Analysis
- Review Usabilla's competitor's websites to understand what they were doing, what they did right, and – more importantly – what they did wrong.
- Provides a solid base on which to start with Usabilla's design, together with the user feedback and user interviews.
4. Task Analysis
8. Improving individual pages
Feedback on old product page collected from Usabilla
- Additional user research relevant to individual pages: User surveys, analytical research, user feedback analysis.
- Provides an additional layer of research on top of what we've already learnt.
- This allows for page-specific specialisation, whilst still retaining an overall site experience.
5. Journey Mapping
- Based on the previous research, we begin mapping the journey of Usabilla's users through the new website.
- The focus here is to ensure efficiency of the flow, and quality of the experience.
- Flexibility of the post-its allow us to iteratively optimise.
6. Wireframing
7. Visual Design
9. Hi-fi Prototyping
- With the first version of the visual design complete, we move to UXpin for a higher fidelity of prototype.
- The aim here is to understand how the website will work in practice.
- A process of trial & error, we can iteratively improve the visual design, user flow, user interactions, and user experience.
10. Continuous Improvement
- With the final design agreed and settled upon, the work slows down for now but never ends.
- Usabilla's very own feedback button ensures the website is always collecting feedback.
- The design can be iterated according to user feedback.
Outcome
The new usabilla.com was implemented in summer 2015, the same summer as I left the company.
The live website has slowly iterated away from this implementation, yet remnants of the user-flow and my copy still exist to this day.