Understanding User Behaviour and Navigation Patterns on Terra Foundation's Website.
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Client: Terra Foundation for American Art
Project Overview
The TERRA Foundation for American Art fosters intercultural dialogue and aims to expand the narrative of American Art through grant programs, visual art projects and fellowship opportunities. TERRA recently re-imagined the foundations mission and intends to re-vamp their website to reflect the same. Thus the primary aim of this research was to analyze user behavior on the website to inform design decisions for an iterative modification of their existing website
Team Members: Kyle Oden, Mishi Sarda, Sacchit Vartak
My Role
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Conducted thorough analysis of the websites Google Analytics and HotJar data to gain insight into user behavior and navigation flow.
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Collaborated with team members to consolidate key findings and provide actionable recommendations.
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Designed a visual summary report with a fellow team member to highlight high level findings.
Tools: Google Analytics, HotJar, Figma
Measuring user behaviour on the website
Research Goals & Objectives
1. Identify the limitations in the website's navigation and user flow and its resulting impact on the user's journey.
2. Analyze how new and returning users interact with the various elements on the website and how it impacts their experience.
Research Process
DISCOVER
Understand Client Needs
Gather Website Trends
DEFINE
Specify Research Scope
Identify Analysis Method
ANALYZE
Gather Insights
Analyse Website Trends
RECOMMEND
Propose Solutions
A/B Test Plan
4 Key research questions to guide our evaluation
The client aimed to evaluate how effectively users navigated through and achieved primary tasks on the website They wanted to also analyze how the website's redesign has affected the performance of the website. We aimed at answering the following research questions to drive our analysis.
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What was the overall impact of the redesigned pages in helping users access key content on the website?
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How do new users approach the process of applying for grants?
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What pages do users generally find challenging to navigate through?
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What are the most frequently performed tasks and how do users navigate around them?
Methodology
Gathering behavioural insights through click stream and web analytics
Time Frame: May 26 to October 5, 2022
Our team used Google Analytics to gather, analyze and report website trends needed to inform key decisions for the site.
Metrics analyzed: Bounce rate, average time on page, page views and navigation routes.
Time Frame: May 26 to October 5, 2022
We used Hotjar to gather behavioural insights and analyze the most popular sections on each individual page. ​
Metrics analyzed: click maps, heat maps, scroll maps, user recordings.
Identifying User Segments
Who are the users and how are they accessing the site?
New Users make up majority of the visitors on the website (87%) and generally visit more number of pages and spend more time navigating through different pages on the site.
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Since the analytics data suggested that users primarily accessed the website through a desktop, we decided to focus our research on TERRA Foundations desktop site.
Visual summary of the high level findings
Overall Findings
What is the most frequently performed task on the website?
Analysing the user recordings, page views, and user navigation paths our team was able to infer that applying for Grants and Fellowships is the most frequently performed task on the TERRA Foundation Website.
The Grants and Fellowships page is the second most visited page (after the homepage) on the website accounting for 3,512 page views.
70% of the users scroll way below the fold of the page to gather detailed information about specific grants.
How has the redesign impacted the websites success?
The TERRA foundation redesigned key pages on their website to ensure better alignment with their new mission and vision. Based on Google Analytics data, we can infer that while the Grants and Fellowships and About pages saw an improvement in overall metrics the Art Collections page did not perform as expected.
Diving deeper to analyze the metrics and derive key findings.
As a team we collaboratively analyzed our individual findings and identified common themes. Since each of us had conducted in-depth research into selected pages, we shared our findings and mapped them out to determine the user flow and website behaviour. This short discovery workshop helped us narrow down to 3 key findings.
Key Finding 1
Vital information is not easily visible and accessible to users
HotJar analysis suggests that users primarily access the website to gather information about deadlines, eligibility and process to apply for grants. This information is currently hidden in the accordions at the end of the page directly affecting discoverability.
Additionally, based on the observation of user recordings, users keep going back and forth between pages in an attempt to find the required information which reflects that the information is hard to find. The figure alongside showcases that users barely scroll till the very end of the accordions.
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Recommendation 1
Move vital information above the fold to make it easily discoverable
Restructuring the layout of the page by including quick links of vital information above the fold will help increase accessibility and discoverability of key content required to apply for grants.
Reducing the page scroll will also help reduce the overall motor load on the users. Additionally, redesigning the page structure will also help maintain consistency across the website.
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Key Finding 2
Difficulty understanding the application process due to lack of a defined structure
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Excessive content coupled with lack of a defined structure in the “How to Apply” section adds to the users cognitive load. Further more, there is a lot of repetition of information which increases the visual load.
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User Recordings also suggest that users generally tend to navigate back and forth in search of a CTA. The primary reason for this could be that the colour of CTA links are similar to the section headings on the page and lack affordance making their function unclear to users.
Recommendation 2
Restructure the application process into easy to grasp steps
Restructuring the application process by breaking down content into easily digestible steps will make it easier for the users to comprehend and follow through on the application process and reduce cognitive load.
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Furthermore, making important CTA's easily distinguishable will probably lead to an increase in the number of grant applications.
Analysing The Effectiveness of Recommendation 2
Conducting an A/B Test Study
The recommendation to restructure the "How to Apply" section can be integrated into the websites existing content structure and its effectiveness can be tested through an A/B Test study.
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HYPOTHESIS
Structuring the grant application process into smaller steps and adding clear CTA’s will result in improved discoverability and understanding of the process and an increase in the number of grant applications.
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METRICS
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Number of new grant applications
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Number of clicks on CTA’s
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AUDIENCE
New and Returning Users
Key Finding 3
The redesign has affected the performance of the Art Collections page
Based on Google Analytics data, there is a significant change in the following metrics after the redesign of Art Collection page:
Page Views: 79.14%
Avg Time on Page: 49.77%
Bounce Rate: 253.05%
Page Value: 235.00%
It is interesting to note that although all the primary metrics have seen a significant drop, the overall page value has seen a considerable increase.
Recommendation 3
Conduct Further Testing
Analysing why and how the redesign affected the performance of Art Collections page goes beyond the scope of web analytics and our team recommended further testing.
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We recommend conducting a Moderated Usability Study to observe and evaluate user behaviour on the redesigned Art Collections page. Areas to consider while researching can be:
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Challenges faced by the users in performing various tasks
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Is the information on the page is structured appropriately for the users?
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How can the content be structured better?
Client Feedback
The recommendations are wonderful!
We presented our findings and recommendations to the client via Zoom walking them through each metric considered and its resulting impact on user behavior. The clients were very happy with our work and made clear their interest in conducting the A/B test and that they agreed it would definitely help with acquiring data driven results. They loved the recommendations about restructuring and redesigning the individual grants pages and echoed our understanding and logic behind them.
Next Steps & Lessons Learned
The next step would be setting up the A/B Test Study for the client on Google Optimize so they can analyze the effectiveness of our recommendation.
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The most important lesson learnt in the project is the fact that Quantitative data has its own limitations. Quite often, quantitative data alone isn't effective and must be coupled with Qualitative data to get deeper insights. I would be interested to know more about the users challenges on the Art Collections page through a Moderated Usability Study.