A look at how I approached rebuilding and redesigning the header for our feature website as part of a full site makeover.

• Project Completed 2021
• Project Role UX/UI, Branding, User Research, Usability Testing, Management, Information Architecture

Background

As senior web designer at a mid size business-2-business media company, I led the initiative to investigate our site analytics following a dramatic increase in user traffic.

Challenges

Our existing web site analytics needed more sophisticated tracking features to have a better understanding of the traffic patterns the sites were experiencing. Identifying the source of our traffic spike was the largest and most important challenge at this stage of the project.

Strategy and Approach

I researched and reviewed web site analytic services and recommended utilizing additional analytics software capable of expanding our analytics insight, specifically leveraging heat mapping.

Heat mapping would capture click frequency after the users landed on our site. We knew most of our traffic was coming in through our newsletter but wanted to know where they were going after first engagement.

Execution

After analyzing our site and heat map tests we identified two core improvements: focus our efforts on the newsletter since it was driving over 85% of our traffic, and redesign our header and main navigation to emphasize our newsletter call to action while also reducing the total number of actionable links.

Results and Metrics

By reducing the total number of links within the site header we were able to better customize and control editorial themes which converted into larger client contracts and by including a new call to action within the main menu, creating a new user capture funnel for newsletter subscriptions, new user signups increase roughly 20% month over month.