UX for Return on investment

Need

To increase online sales

Solution

UX Focus on UX to improve the customer journey

Result

60%60% increase in sales on same period previous year

How we did it

Strategy Meeting

Karma Interactive and GSA engaged in a strategy meeting. We acknowledged that good traffic was coming to the website, because of a strong Google Ad campaign which was in place. But that visitors were not being converted to sales. The strategy meeting involves a combination of identifying customer avatars, use cases, scenario testing and my favourite, lots and lots of post it notes.

Identifying the problem

It became apparent during the meeting, that the sites user journey was broken. A combination of bad navigation structure, heavy use of large imagery and sliders - the home page was cluttered and confusing. It was not clear for the user how to achieve their goals or what GSA wanted them to do.

Rapid prototyping

Some people laugh at the idea of using post-it notes. But rapid prototyping ideas, functionality and features can be expensive to prototype for real online… not to mention the time and effort. This simple solution means that ideas can be hashed out during a meeting and especially when ideas are in flow.

Bespoke Design and Functionality

As all of my clients know, I’m not a fan of off-the-shelf templates, well, I am and I am not. Templates are great when they fix a problem, for example with ecommerce sites I use WooCommerce. WooCommerce has an excellent user flow - from viewing a product, right through to making a purchase. Therefore, I am very happy to use a functional template that works. The problem falls when a template doesn’t 1) help your customers achieve their goals, 2) help your website achieve you business goals.

Designing for our users

In our meeting we found that the site was commonly visited by the following user types:

People with an acting mission

People who know what type of acting course they want, they want to get info about a specific product as quickly as possible. May have several sites they will visit.
High risk bounce rate
Goal: Get them where they want as quickly as possible.

People with an acting itch

People who are interested in acting but aren’t sure what they want, they are looking for something to do part time. And maybe acting will float their boat.
Medium risk bounce rate
Goal: Show them featured / seasonal courses and offer them a Try it for free.

People who need information about GSA

People aware of GSA and need to find some information regarding the school, alumni agency.
People who are engaged with GSA and are looking for latest information

And two sub groups

Adults
Children

We found that by adding several bespoke features it dramatically changed the user journey for our different site visitors, including:

Filtering

Rather than a standard search, which displays all types of content such as news. This filtering feature focuses only on product/courses. It is front and centre on the site, it’s the main objective to make it easy to find what product/course a user wants
Depending on a user’s choice the filtering displays different secondary filtering. I.e. children have a secondary filter of Age, whereas adults don’t.

Navigation

Previously the site had a very cluttered menu taking up a lot of space, it was counterproductive and we believed that it was a major factor in people not finding the information they were looking for. We rethought the navigation, now it is a feature of its own that sits behind the website. When the menu button is clicked the page slides away revealing the menu.
The menu is a simple slide navigation, sitting beside this is all the contact information including maps to locations.
We wanted the users to feel that when the clicked the menu button they would say “This is exactly where I will find what I want”.

Content

A clear distinction between news and events which was one feature previously. These are essentially 2 types of content that potentially speaks to different audiences.
Events now feature high on the site, as potentially they can generate revenue where as news is now mixed with casting. and is used predominantly as a content marketing strategy.