RenewEconomy is Australia’s best informed, most respected and most read website focusing on the green energy transition. It is considered a must read by the industry and policy-makers, and others with a strong interest in the transition to a zero carbon economy. In the calendar 2021, it boasted unique page views of more than 14.5 million, and enjoyed average monthly unique visitors of more than 500,000.
The majority of RenewEconomy's revenue comes from ad display across the website, as well as user page sessions. RenewEconomy had been noticing high bounce rates, especially from article pages, which was leading to a significant loss of revenue. Being Sliced Bread Social's sole UX designer, my role on this project was to run User Research, analyse the data and design solutions that could be implemented within the given budget. My research was targeted qualitative data, focussing on feedback from user testing sessions, while another team member analysed the quantitative data from Google Analytics. I then designed wireframes on which I ran user testing sessions, and then closely collaborated with the developer to ensure all the right automations were built in the right areas, and that the final product was fully responsive. The result from this project is a fully re-designed website that focusses on content navigation, personalisation, and ease of use.
This project aimed to tackle key challenges affecting user engagement and revenue generation on the website. The first challenge centered on improving user navigation on the website, fostering a more intuitive and engaging experience for visitors. The second goal of the project aimed to boost user retention, particularly on article pages, simultaneously increasing RenewEconomy's revenue, aligning with the overarching objective of sustaining and growing the business’ financial health. By addressing these goals, RenewEconomy sought to create a more compelling and personalised user journey for its audience.
The first thing we needed to do was look at the Quant: what were Google Analytics saying? What were the actual bounce rates? How long were user sessions? What did the behavioural flow look like? What did heat maps tell us; what page areas had the highest and lowest engagement? The quantitative data was collected via Google tools to create a set of benchmarking data to measure against in coming months as the project recommendations were implemented. These results helped guide the focus areas of the user testing, which enabled us to understand the “why” that laid behind the “what”.
The review was based off Jakob Nielsen's Usability Heuristics and helped me identify areas that I would focus the user testing on. The major problematic heuristics that stood out to me were: ease of use, navigation, efficiency, information architecture and consistency and standards.
User retention and engagement are RenewEconomy’s primary objective, so I targeted the user testing sessions around understanding what usability elements increase retention rates. RenewEconomy’s target audience are users that have a level of interest and engagement in the renewable energy and climate sectors that is higher than the average person.
I tested two audience segments; users who were existing readers of RenewEconomy, and users who had not before used the RenewEconomy website but fell within the target audience. The testing focussed on assessing the user’s navigational experience, observing the behaviour flow of their journey on the site, and identifying key pain points. Participants were given specific tasks, asked questions, and encouraged to give live feedback.
The main goals of these sessions were:
• Reveal ‘pain points’ and confusing experiences
• Assess the overall navigation experience
• Identifying key user behaviours
I also included an information architecture exercise to re-evaluate the menu navigation of the website, and make is more user-centered. I asked user to re-organise each of the categories based off their interests, sorting them from highest interest to lowest. I encouraged them to merge categories together if they felt they could be organised better.
Data and feedback were collected and analysed through the affinity mapping process, enabling us to synthesise all of the information into key themes as they related to each page.
The main takeaway of the entire sessions was the majority of the participants described feeling RenewEconomy required better content personalisation and better navigation to guide them in their user flow.
“The options are limited, I feel like I am missing out.”
Users encountered significant challenges with the homepage of RenewEconomy, the central hub displaying all articles. New users felt restricted by the limited article types, perceiving the layout as cluttered and struggling to discern the site's main value proposition. They found the lack of organisation off-putting, hindering navigation and discouraging future use.
“It’s hard to understand what they are doing.”
Current users also faced difficulties due to the visual layout, missing categories, and an inability to locate essential content easily. The presence of features like Podcasts went unnoticed, as users rarely scrolled past the latest articles. Both new and current users overlooked the hamburger menu, leading to frustration over the non-sticky navigation bar, making the experience more tedious.
“What should be jumping out isn’t jumping out.”
Furthermore, users expected category pages to display organised lists of articles belonging to sub-categories, but they were disappointed by an unorganized list lacking sub-category indications. Addressing these issues is crucial to enhancing user experience and encouraging prolonged engagement with the RenewEconomy website.
The website faced challenges in providing personalised content to users, hindering their ability to seamlessly navigate from one article to another and maintain a continuous reading journey. During user testing, both current and new users were asked to demonstrated their article-reading flow; this revealed that the high bounce rates on article pages were a result of the absence of personalised content. Users resorted to opening each article in separate tabs, reading, and closing tabs to proceed to the next one.
At the bottom of each article, users were presented with "previous" and "next article" links, along with a list of articles from Renew Economy's sister publications, "The Driven" and "One Step Off The Grid." Feedback from user testing and Google Analytics data indicated that these sections garnered very low interest, with minimal user engagement. Users expressed a lack of interest in browsing additional articles from the page, as the content presented was not related to their specific interests.
“They are not working hard to sustain my attention."
After presenting the research findings to stakeholders, I proceeded to brainstorm and wireframe solutions.
• A full sticky navigation bar was introduced, replacing the hard-to-find hamburger menu that previously served as a navigation tool.
• The visual hierarchy of the content was highly optimised, going from a vertical stacked layout to a grid layout, and displaying content more intuitively with maximum use of screen real-estate. High interest elements such as Podcasts were given a prominent space on the page. This enabled users to navigate through all the latest articles in a single space, improving overall clarity and engagement.
• The content was categorised, this provided users with a diversified choice of content based on their preferences, improving the overall browsing experience. The displayed categories were determined through analytics and information architecture exercises during user testing.
• New sections such as "Editor's picks" and "Most read" were introduced, highlighting articles of higher importance and engagement. This aims to create a more personalised and human-centered experience.
As a result of the new layout, the ads across the website are less prominent and intrusive. The new layout incorporates new areas for ad placements without affecting the navigation experience.
Similar to the homepage, a first section laid out all the latest articles of that category, all sub-categories included. Scrolling further down, I presented users with the 4 latest of each sub-category, with a button to navigate to the full page of each sub-category.
The “previous” and “next” links were removed, as well as the sister publications. They were replaced with “Articles for you” - a list of articles that share the same category of the one they are currently reading; “Most read” - people tend to show higher interest in content that is popular amongst other users; “Other news” - giving them the option to browse other of the latest published articles.
This project is still a work in progress, and the new build is set to launch this Friday 12/01/2024. Over the course of the next 6 months, we will be closely tracking analytics and feedback, preparing for another round of user testing sessions to identify new areas of improvement.
This comprehensive redesign not only addressed navigation challenges but also created a more more user-centric and intuitive experience. This should contribute to enhanced user satisfaction, longer engagement, and increased potential for future visits and revenue generation.
