LITMUS
Homepage & IA Redesign
The problem
When I joined the company, they had just released a major overhaul to the product - a ground-up redesign of almost the entire thing. (Yes, as a UX person, it was a bummer to join right after a project like that rather than right before it!).
As I was doing my initial deep dive into the product, the data, and the users, I started noticing some issues. Trial conversion was lower than we wanted. There was anecdotal evidence from customer conversations that they were having trouble getting into the new experience, beyond what might be expected from natural change aversion. And from my own heuristic review, I felt there were some things that could be improved.
The research
First, we kicked off a formal research study into the new experience, focused on new users. This validated a number of the concerns I had identified, enough that I was able to get buy-in on a project to make some improvements.
We focused on three key areas (referenced in the image on the right):
The navigation in the new product didn’t actually mention any of the key value propositions of the product. In fact, it was basically working as a “Junk drawer” of links to tertiary features that hadn’t fit anywhere else, leaving new users at a loss for what the identity of the product even was.
The use of “Inbox” was confusing — it was meant to be where you find all the email you were working on in Litmus, but most users associated the term with email they themselves had received.
It was difficult to know how to get started, especially for new users. There were multiple calls to action, but none of them was crystal clear. For instance, “New Email” didn’t resonate as a call to action for users who had a pre-existing email they wanted to test, even though it was the intended action for them too.
The Project
With the problem clearly understood, and buy-in from the company, we spun up a team to focus on improvements to the Information Architecture of the product and the Home page.
Since I had been the impetus for the project, I worked closely with the team throughout. We ended up making several key improvements:
A new global navigation that explicitly referenced the core areas of the product, giving users a way to understand the scope of the product at a glance, as well as a place to go to learn more about a capability or focus on that functionality.
The “ribbon,” which gave a place to offer clear starting points to users, based on the two primary use cases that most users had (Building a new email or testing an existing email). It also gave us space to highlight other things, like new features or useful resources.
Several small changes to the whole experience, including reworked terminology in the sidebar to help people find their email projects more easily.
The Results
The new design was a success. It tested very well with users, and we saw several metrics improve, most notably Trial Activation Rate, which jumped significantly compared to the original.
The original home page view when I joined (with annotations)
The home page after we finished our updates