Assessing user behavior to optimize web experience for Pratt's News website

Discipline

Design evaluation, research, design

Role

Researcher, designer

Danielle Kingberg, Grace Guo, Preet Gangrade, Xiujie Bi

Pratt News website covers institute-wide updates and activities about Pratt’s programs, faculty, alumni, students, and more. Recently, the website has received a redesign to improve its user experience. Our team was interested in learning how people interact with the website and respond to the new design. We studied the website’s performance and user behavior using Google Analytics and Hotjar and identified areas for improvement in the navigation menu, CTA buttons, article previews, and the Prattfolio page.

The purpose was to analyze how people interact with the website and respond to the new design to understand how the website performs, suggest ways to increase engagement, and inform the design of Pratt's main website.

I focused on interpreting data on Google Analytics and Hotjar to propose areas of improvement for the website. I helped facilitate group discussions to ensure everything was covered. I also tackled the presentation slides to make sure the storyline was clear and easy to follow.

We wanted to answers questions about who the users are, how effective the visual hierarchy to engage the users by device is, what elements get the most and least engagement by device, what people are clicking on, and how does the placement of these elements affect users' interaction.

Our team used Google Analytics to identify patterns and trends of how users engage with the website. Key metrics included users, sessions, bounce rates, pageviews, and average session duration.

We also looked at Hotjoar, which provides behavioral insights like heatmaps, scroll maps, and video recordings. Heatmaps and scroll maps are visual summaries of mouse movements and how far users scroll down a webpage. The more popular the area is, the hotter/warmer the color is. Some of the key metrics included clicks and scroll rates.

We discovered that 65% are new users, and 35% are returning users. 64% of users access the Pratt News website on a desktop, while 34% use their mobile devices. Mobile users also spend more time browsing than desktop users. For instance, 70% of mobile users reach the Daily Hub section, whereas only 50% reach on desktop. However, mobile has a 25% higher bounce rate than desktop.

The Pratt News homepage has two navigation bars. The first one is for the main Pratt website, and the second is for the Pratt News. We discovered that the navigation bars on desktop are easier to navigate, which attracts more clicks to explore the website. However, the navigation menus become less accessible on mobile because the second navigation turns into a folded menu, leading to fewer interactions than the main hamburger menu.

The CTA buttons are placed at the bottom of each section. As a result, it's inconvenient to navigate for users who aren't familiar with the page layout. This resulted in fewer clicks and views for sections, such as The Daily Hub and the Prattfolio page.

We learned that icons and images received more clicks on the mobile experience. 40% of users preferred to click images and icons over plain texts. 20% clicked pictures rather than titles to access news articles. However, more users accessed content through titles than pictures on desktop.

On the Prattfolio page, there's a low bounce rate of 25%, which indicates that the page is effectively guiding users to the desired pages—and we discovered that those pages were Current Issue and Departments.

Despite a low bounce rate, users spent an average of 30 seconds on this page, meaning that they were leaving the page quickly without reading the content further. Furthermore, 75% of desktop users only reached the second article on the Prattfolio page.

When the navigation menu is more convenient, it creates a lower bounce rate and avoids long scrolling to get to the desired content for users. Therefore, we recommend expanding the second navigation bar and make the menus visible to the users. It also builds a clear hierarchy and distinguishes between the main Pratt navigation and the News menus.

We recommend introducing the CTA buttons at the top of each section. This way, it provides an immediate visual indicator to encourage more clicks and directs them to the All articles page.

We also saw an opportunity to reduce the content length shown on the Homepage. For example, the posts in the Daily Hub are displayed horizontally on desktop, while they are shown vertically on mobile, leading to excessive scrolling. Therefore, we propose to scale down the image size or removing some of the images to allow more articles to show.

To streamline the experience, we advise simplifying the article previews by removing the descriptions for non-featured articles and adding CTA buttons to help the users navigate and entice more interaction. We also encourage reducing the image size and title length so that it offers more room for content above the fold—creating a less scrolling pageview.

To encourage more exploration of the latest articles and reduce back-and-forth clicks on the page, we propose combining the main Prattfolio page and Current Issue to streamline the experience by giving users direct access. Moreover, replacing the Current Issue menu with Past Issues with a drop-down menu to accommodate the need for searching for past publications and make the content available as part of the main Prattfolio page.

We presented our findings and recommendations to the Director of Web and Digital Communications and the Developer at Pratt Institute and received positive feedback. In general, they were impressed and appreciated by the data-driven suggestions and found them to be insightful and easy to implement.

The client responded to the navigation recommendation the most, even though it contradicted another study presented. They agreed that relocating the CTA button to the top of each section allows more space for content. However, they felt that placing it at the bottom as an expansion of the content made more sense. They also liked the idea of adjusting and removing the images in the Daily Hub, but it might be challenging to pull off for mobile, especially, and editorials might not like the idea.

Our team is interested in working together to conduct further studies like A/B testing to evaluate which option works better for the users, such as the placement of the CTA buttons. We are also looking forward to seeing how these recommendations influence the new main Pratt website in the future.