Dummies.com Homepage Redesign
The Dummies.com team approached me to help with the redesign of their homepage. There was very little time (weeks) and no money to work with. A challenge when you're dealing with a page that receives an enormous amount of traffic.
Goal: Reduce the abandon rate on the homepage.
Result: With Google Analytics I tracked the existing and new homepage with an A/B test. The new page had a 7% reduction in abandonment.
Above: The previous Dummies.com homepage. This page suffered from a lack of direction and different teams competing for traffic from the same page.
Team sketch.
Sketch!
I facilitated a group sketch exercise. This brought together members of the Dummies team, as well as UX designers on my team. With very little time to act, this exercise helped us gather as many "requirements" as we could in a short period of time. 1.5 hours later and we had a rough design.
Some of our ideas coming to life!
The team moved quickly! We started with individual sketching. 4 quick sketches in 5 minutes. Then we reviewed together and moved on to paired sketching of 2 sketches for another 5 minutes. Lastly, we split the group into two teams of 4 each to create their final sketch.
One example of a person's vision of the new Dummies.com homepage.
Capture Ideas
Throughout the sketching and presentation I was capturing ideas that the team surfaced. This was a long list, but it was very helpful to refer to later when I sat to design the new page.
At the end of the session, each person was given a colored marker. I allowed each of them to mark 3 dots on ideas that meant the most to them. This was super helpful as I designed later.
The Wire
Following the sketch exercise, it took me about an hour to pull this sketch together to review with the team. As expected, since the team was involved in its creation, there was very little feedback on it.
The Final Comp
Our designer was able to quickly create the design of the homepage which later was coded and live a couple weeks later.