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A data-driven website rebrand
A data-driven website rebrand
Going from Sympatico.ca to The Loop was all about numbers
Going from Sympatico.ca to The Loop was all about numbers
The Sympatico.ca travel section
prior to re-design
The problem
The problem
Sympatico.ca was a successful Canadian lifestyle website, however it needed to be refreshed and updated.
Meetings with stakeholders revealed that despite its popularity and high level of user engagement, the brand itself had very little recognition. Also, our advertisers were increasingly interested in an audience that skewed female, but our users were split 50/50 male-female.
These factors motivated a complete rebrand and overhaul of our content strategy. The stakeholders decided that the new brand identity would be created by an agency, however the new content strategy and UX was to be spearheaded by the product and content team.
The stakeholders also communicated our main value proposition: "To make your life better."
My role on this project was to oversee this process for the travel section.
Note: During this project, my teammates and I did not have the UX training that I possess now. Therefore, when I look back at this project I feel that there were several missed opportunities I wish we had made use of. I have listed these throughout.
Top: The year's top 10 performing articles. Bottom: Soul layers articulate how content brings value to users.
The method
The method
Our re-design project had 3 main goals:
Create a content strategy in response to quantitative data
Refine content strategy using qualitative data
Create a clean and modern UI
Quantitative data: We identified the top performing content by pulling site metrics from the past year. There were 5 key themes that made this top performing content successful. We used these themes to create a content strategy that would engage the greatest number of target users.
Qualitative metrics: We pinned down 13 "soul layers" which were the essential ways our product brought value to the users. These soul layers were the guiding principles that informed our content strategies across all brands under the Bell Media umbrella, and what made our content offering distinct and flavourful.
The Family
Aliko Sunawang/Unsplash
The Adventurer
Denys Nevozhai/Unsplash
Luxury for Less
Chelsea Gates/Unsplash
Defining user personas
Prior to the re-design, our content strategy was driven by 5 user proto-personas.
The product owner and I organized and ran a series of workshops that included several stakeholders and other members of the team who had profiles that were similar to the proto-personas.
During our discussion it was noted that some of these proto-personas have needs that overlap, so we decided to narrow our focus to 3 user proto-personas that best represented our users.
In this workshop, we also used storyboarding to outline the various ways in which our users would interact with our product.
Missed Opportunity: User interviews
Sympatico.ca had a very large user base that was very engaged. Although we had a lot of insight from the feedback we received on a regular basis through our comments, conducting semi-structured interviews with these real users and pulling them together into focus groups would have allowed us to eliminate even more of the assumptions that we started the project with.
Engaging these users in our UXR would have also allowed us to build user personas based on actual user research, rather than relying on proto-personas. This would have also allowed our storyboarding to be more informed.
Ideation
We did a blue skies exercise with our workshop participants to brainstorm all the features our users would want in an ideal travel publication. Throughout this conversation, we kept relating our ideas back to 2 of the 3 primary goals (creating a content strategy that attracts the most target users, and refining that content to give it a unique flavour). We then used dot voting to gauge which features would bring the most delight to our users.
Following the workshop, my product manager and I used an impact/effort matrix to decide which features we were going to prioritize for launch.
Site Navigation
There were many different opinions on how we should organize the site sections. In the end, we decided there were too many cooks in the kitchen, and it would be better to have this conversation in a smaller group in order the move forward with a final decision.
The product owner and I met again, and decided that the menu should be as simple as possible to reduce the amount of clicking around, in favour of more scrolling.
I created wireframes for the UI designer who then created the interface design.
Missed Opportunity: We really struggled with this portion of the process. There were just too many opinions on how to organized our site sections. Rather than shying away from complexity, it would have been more beneficial to our process if we embraced complexity and dove into this decision making. In an ideal scenario we should have conducted a card sorting exercise with actual users in order to get a better understanding of what will work. This would have eliminated any of the guesswork.
The final product
The final product
In less than a year we launched the Loop, a lifestyle publication that "makes your life better". The Loop's travel section was a destination to find all the best trip ideas, travel deals and helpful info to make your trips better.
We had 3 main goals for the re-design project:
Create a content strategy in response to quantitative data
Refine content strategy using qualitative data
Create a clean and modern UI
We met these goals with the following strategies.
Prioritizing metric movers
Our brand narrative was moving away from hedonistic to more helpful and practical content, however the hedonistic stuff is what moved metrics. Thus we needed to strike the proper balance for our users between "this is where I can dream" vs. "this is where I can learn."
In terms of content strategy, we allocated most of our content budget to hedonistic content to make sure we hit our monthly traffic targets. We allocated a smaller amount to practical and helpful content in order to feed the long term brand goals.
Giving users what they want
Prior to the re-design, we were attempting to get the user to engage with content they didn't really want. The user proto-personas helped us bring the focus back to proactively creating user centered content.
We also shifted focus away from click bait headlines, towards engaging headlines to target their right user and keep them interested with the quality of the content.
Not burying the good stuff
We eliminated the cluttered 3-column design, and replaced it with a simple two-column layout with large images and a simple navigation so users can see the content without clicking around or getting lost in the busy mess.
We also made improvements to our photo gallery tool, and structured all photo gallery content so that the best stuff is always displayed first to maintain user interest.
Understanding user context
Entry points: homepage vs. hub
Users that enter the site through the homepage have a different context from users that enter through a bookmarked site section.
We used the more hedonistic content to drive clicks from the home page, and used more practical and helpful content to drive return visits to the travel site section. Content with strong headlines was sandwiched between content that had large, attractive images in order to maintain interest as the user scrolls.
Impact
Within 3 months of launch, our users went from 50/50 female-male, to 60/40. This was a primary goal for our team and we were thrilled to have reached it so quickly!
Our overall site traffic went down, however, we still met all of our monthly targets with the strategic engagement of our users.
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