Wireframe Testing: Failing Informatively
We're undergoing some changes here at nten.org. Specifically, we're looking to make our site easier for you and all of our visitors to use. We've been very lucky to grow our site traffic by about 60 to 70% each of the last two years. Since we're a small organization without a lot of marketing dollars to spend -- or, ahem, any -- we need to make sure we're making the most of this traffic.
According to our web site stats, we're not. Our bounce rate is pretty darn high for folks who find our site through search: about 68%. New visitors also bounce at a high rate: about 67%. Our blog, which gives us the most traffic from search, has a bounce rate above 75%.
Friend of NTEN Avinash Kaushik says that organizations should aim for a bounce rate under 50%. We don't expect our new visitor bounce rate will get THAT low, but there's some work we can do to make sure people find MORE great content and stick around our site.
There are two pieces to that puzzle. Part of making our content more compelling has to do with design. But the first thing we need to focus on is the information architecture, or navigation, of our site. The fine folks at Beaconfire are helping us wade through this process. Lots of you helped us with Phase One: The Card Sort.
This week, we moved on to Phase Two: The Wireframe Test. It's a fascinating process that let's you see right away what exactly you're doing wrong. If you've never seen a wireframe test before, here's how we did it (really cheaply!):
Here are some of the findings we're taking away from the dozen or so tests we did:
- You want more community. We need to integrate more of the great people and conversations that make NTEN what it is into the site. This vibrancy will keep people glued to our pages.
- Our site has too many words. Almost everyone commented on that.
- Finding content about a particular topic is hard on our current site. Say you're interested in virtualization. Good luck finding out more about it. You'll have to use the search bar, and that doesn't return results in a very pretty way.
- The whole "My Information" and "My Transactions" area is very confusing. We need to do a lot of work in there to make it much easier for people to see what they're signed up for, if their membership is current, etc.
- You all have strong feelings about webinars. Half of you insisted that webinars are NOT events. The other half insisted that they ARE events.
We got lots of great feedback and are looking forward to the next phase -- turning it into a new navigation scheme for the site.
