Enhancing the Content Performance: Pratt News Website
Fall 2021 | Digital Analytics
Project in a Nutshell
New Pratt News website was launched in July 2021. Incorporating news with articles, portfolio pieces and periodicals of the Pratt Institute, it is an integral part of the current website. Its new design is also important for it is a new approach and any feedback could inform future decisions for the main website too.
In this digital analytics project our team evaluated the website from a content perspective and concluded that changes in the use of space and replacement of certain elements could enhance user engagement and user experience.
My Role
user experience researcher, user experience designer
Tools
google analytics, hotjar
Timespan
1 month
Using digital analytics tools to understand the nature of content engagement: Methodology
To answer how users consume content, how the content performs on the Pratt News site and how the layout contributes to the user experience, we have employed two main tools:
1- Google analytics was mainly used to derive insights about the user behaviors on the website. Thanks to that tool, we were able to tell things such as which pages users visit, what are the enter and exit patterns of the website and how much the pages were reached.
2- We have also utilized “Hotjar” to see the visualized data on the website. Hotjar allowed us to see how much users clicked and where, how much they scrolled; how they generally interacted with the content.
We were able to extract meaningful insights looking at the data from the perspective our questions have created.
New layout works, but there is room for improvement
While we have utilized the analytics tools for looking at what can work better, we realized that the layout is appreciated by the users. A comparison of newly designed pages with the older ones revealed that, new design is more successful in keeping the users engaged.
Finding: Space can be used more efficiently
Users want to see more content
Combination of clickmaps and scrollmaps from Hotjar revealed that the users want to see more content before actually starting reading any news articles. Most of them first clicked on either “Load More” or “View All Articles” buttons. Also, most of the users were able to see only two article images, before any scrolling.
We recommend:
Utilizing space to fit more content
Realizing the need to see more content, we have concluded that having a new organization would help displaying more content. It would also allow user to see this content without any clicks or scroll.
Finding: Opportunity to promote more content
Users’ journey ends after one article
Google Analytics data showed that the top landing pages are the top exit pages with high bounce rates. That meant, people would leave the website upon reading one article. On the other hand, our move map and click map analysis revealed that people who did not leave utilized the “Related Articles” section to go to new articles.
We recommend:
Changing the place of “related articles” to promote valuable content
We suggest, moving “Related Articles” to the right side of the screen would be a more conventional and convenient use of space. It would also allow users (who wish to see more) to find other meaningful articles before leaving the website thus increase content engagement.
Finding: User retention and readability can be increased
Website loses traffic before user sees the article titles
Scroll maps demonstrated that average desktop, tablet or mobile users are unable to see any article title without scrolling down in the article pages. The need for scrolling costs up to 10% of traffic until the end of the article title.
We recommend:
relocation of titles for retention and readability
Our group recommends, moving the titles above the images across devices would increase retention. It would also remove the readability issues caused by diverse images used as background.
Feedback & personal takeaways
Feedback from Pratt News team
We were happy to see that the Pratt News representatives found our findings relevant and insightful. It was also delightful to hear that these findings would contribute to the ongoing discussions about upcoming design decisions.
Personal takeaways
I am impressed how we were able to derive meaningful results from raw data once we have formulated the questions to ask and decided our research goals. It was great to be part of this team as we were able to demonstrate our strong sides while practicing for the things we are not normally accustomed to.
Personally, I am happy that I got the chance to hone my quantitative analytics skill and got further familiarized with Hotjar and Google Analytics.
Thank you for reading!
interested in learning more about this project? send me an email for a detailed discussion
ciftciali94@gmail.com
