Restructuring Content: Improving Discoverability of Key Information for the TERRA Foundation for American Art
Client: TERRA Foundation for American Art
Duration: 3 Weeks
Software : Google Analytics, Hotjar, Figma, Miro
Team Members : Anamika Menon, Mishi Sarda, Sacchit Vartak
Project Overview
The TERRA Foundation for American Art is non-profit organization aimed at supporting American exhibits, artists, and scholarship. Recently, the Terra Foundation reimagined their Mission, making it more inclusive, and they redesigned various pages to go a long with with this new vision. This project primarily focused on the performance of these redesigned pages and tasks that are critical to the organization’s operations, such as applying for art related grants or artwork loans. My team collected and monitored user behavior through tools such as Hotjar and Google Analytics in order to come up with recommendations to support.
My Role
For this project my team was divided into the following primary roles which helped structure our meetings and work flow:
I was the team facilitator
Anamika Menon was our editor
Mishi Sarda was our administrator
Sacchit Vartak was our manager
As facilitator my primary duty was keeping the team on task, guiding our discussions, and ensuring we all knew our assignments for our next check-in. More generally, for this project, I analyzed and collected data from Google Analytics and Hotjar to help create our findings, recommendations, and mockups; drafted and finalized our slide deck report; and presented our findings and recommendations to key stakeholders.
The Challenge: Understanding the limitations of behavioral analytics data
The nature of this project was initially challenging. Knowing that we were collecting and analyzing rather indirect data, the team had to figure out how to translate our data to actionable findings and recommendations for the TERRA Foundation. We also were working withe a partially redesigned site and wanted to know about their effectiveness on the site. With only behavioral analytics in our toolkit it seemed that we might miss a really important factor about the redesigned pages: User opinion. Our client, however, was a really big help in providing background for what internally led to the desire to redesign: a reimagined and more inclusive Mission.
Kickoff Meeting: Defining Goals, Scope & Expectations
This project started with a kickoff meeting with two representatives from the TERRA Foundation. They gave us a lot of background on the general user trends of site and which areas they would like us to focus on. This meeting provided us with the following goals and scope for our study:
Identifying the limitations in the website’s navigation and user flow and its resulting impact on the user’s journey.
Analyzing and understanding how new and returning users interact with the various elements on the website and how it impacts their experience.
Planning: Research Questions & Methodology
With our kickoff meeting in mind, we had to make sure our research questions addressed the areas our clients asked us to focus on:
What was the overall impact of the redesigned pages in helping users access/ consume content on the website?
How do new users approach the process of applying for grants?
What pages do users generally find challenging to navigate through?
What are the most frequently performed tasks and how do users navigate around them?
The Redesign: An Overall Success with Some Areas for Improvement
Overall, the TERRA Foundation website showed increased performance for most metrics with the redesigned pages. There were a few tasks on the site that did seem to be slightly mentally taxing based due to the current layout hiding certain key information.
Finding 1: Vital Information was not easily discoverable for users
Our first finding was that users have to scroll well below the fold of the page to get all of the information essential to the grant application process. Additionally, a lot of this information was hidden in accordion elements which adds extra steps and effort for users.
Heat and click map of convening grants page from Hotjar
Screenshot and click map of convening grants page
Recommendation 1: Prominently show vital information
Our recommendation is clearly show the most important information towards the top of the page, and change the accordions to a side panel that updates the information on the page as a user selects it:
Recommendation Mock up
Finding 2: Grant application process appeared difficult for users to follow
The second finding was that the steps to apply for a grant are not in a clear structure and associated CTA’s are not very obvious for users.
Screenshot of current convening grants page
Recommendation 2: Show steps for grant application with helpful labels
Our second recommendation is to clearly label the steps to apply for a grant and add good signifiers for the associated CTA’s:
Recommendation Mock up
Finding 3: Redesign irregularly affected the performance of the art collections Landing page
Lastly, the redesigned Art Collections page had rather contradicting metrics since the redesign:
Screenshot of art collections page
Google Analytics Metrics for Art Collections page
Recommendation 3: More testing required!
We recommended conducting a Usability Study to observe and evaluate the user behavior on the redesigned Art Collections page. Areas to consider while researching can be:
Challenges faced by the users in performing various tasks
If the information on the page is structured appropriately for the users and the improvements to be made
Completion of goals associated with the page
More testing required
Deliverables: A/B Test plan & Visual Summary
Lastly, the redesigned Art Collections page had rather contradicting metrics since the redesign:
A/B test plan for Application Process
Visual Summary of TERRA Foundation Website Analytics
Client Feedback: “Excellent Work, Excellent Analysis, Great Design.”
Overall, our clients were very pleased with our work and presentation. They were very excited about getting our A/B Test up and running as well as seeing our other findings and mock ups. They gave us some feedback about some areas for further exploration that they saw as their next steps.
Group during final client presentation