BestReviews Homepage
overview
BestReviews.com reviews and recommends the best products on the market. As homepage traffic increases, there was a need for a more editorial-style homepage in order to increase repeat visitors and user-engagement.
www.bestreviews.com
*This project was designed in 2019 and may not reflect the current design.
CLIENT
BestReviews
WHEN
Fall 2018 / Winter 2019
MY ROLE
I was the Lead Designer on this project and was in charge of all design and prototyping, and design reviews with developers. I worked alongside our product managers for user-testing and A/B testing.
TOOLS USED
Sketch
Principle
background
BestReviews.com reviews and recommends the best products on the market, simplifying consumer’s purchasing decisions, saving them time and money. BestReviews was partially acquired by Tribune Publishing, who owns about a dozen media platforms such as the Chicago Tribune and the NY Daily News. With this new partnership, came a lot of advertising opportunities and an increase in brand awareness. The BestReviews homepage didn’t used to receive much traffic, as most of our traffic came straight from Google searches that landed the consumer on a product page. The need for a more editorial, top-of-the-funnel styled homepage was important in order to increase repeat visitors and user-engagement.
hotjar findings
Users were abandoning quickly
They weren’t scrolling past the fold
They weren’t engaging with our content
Majority of users would use the search bar to go directly to a product page
user research and pain points
the goals
Instead of coming to our site from a google search when they are ready to make a purchase, we want users to come to our site to browse and find engaging content even when they aren’t necessarily looking to buy anything soon. We wanted to attract more of these top-of-the-funnel users, and have them be repeat visitors.
After talking with users and with our new partners about business-goals, we came up with long-term and short-term goals for the homepage re-design. I used these goals to start iterating on possible solutions.
brainstorm of features
exploration
section breakdown
final homepage design
results
The homepage received an increase in user-engagement by 20% over the next few months. This included longer time spent on the homepage, increased scrolling past the fold, and more consuming of the blog-centric content and social media content. The next steps were to conduct usability tests and do some A/B testing with different content types.