You probably have not noticed but we made a slight change to the flash panel on wayne.edu. In the top drawer we place success stories from around campus. But before you get to the stories it was designed to display a branding image.

Why this made sense then

It made sense when we first launched because it had to portray a “new outlook” of Wayne State. After being stuck promoting events the last 5 years the main focus of the homepage was to show how vibrant and enjoyable campus is.

Why it was time to make a change

It is time to make the change now that the site has been up for a few months, students have come back to campus and are now accustom to the new homepage. We did a few tests and we found that the stories behind the More Information area were not getting as many views/clicks as we wanted. These were the real success stories that change minds and hearts and we needed to bring these to the forefront.

We tested different options

The best way to get these stories in front of users eyes is to remove a layer of the branding images so we started by just removing the branding images all together and put the most recent three stories up front. This got us the clicks we wanted but came at the cost of less people going to the More Information area and completely threw out our impacting images.

Our second test was to keep the first layer of impacting images but when someone clicks on a category within More Information it would go directly to the most recent story and not to another branding image. This would allow the user to not only get right to the most recent story but it also allowed them to easily click through the five categories to see if there was anything by image and not rely on the title.

What we decided on

We decided to keep the second test running. This offered the best results, it still allowed us to bring the impacting images front and center and allowed users to get to the success stories with fewer barriers. It has yielded a +10% increase in views of the newest stories.

Final Thoughts

Keep your users at the forefront of all design and information decisions. Although we did not get any complaints about the success stories being difficult to find we knew we could get more pertinent information to users instead of them just looking at pretty pictures all day. A users time is their most valuable asset and for them to spend any time on yoru site at all you should be flattered, don’t make them waste that time with barriers to information.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 8:06 am and is filed under design, flash, thoughts, update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.