Goal
One of the problems with the Slant home page was the lack of communication on what Slant really was. Much of the traffic coming in would land on one of our question pages, then if the person was interested, they would visit our home page to learn more.
We wanted to create a better experience when a user visited and give a better overview of what was really going on. Every time we start a project, we try to look towards a stat that we can track to understand if we were successful. For this project we looked at new user conversion.
Process
Based on the feedback we've received, we had a pretty good idea about what direction we needed to take the design. Part of the problem with Slant is how different it is from other sites. So for our home page we wanted to keep the layout similar to what other sites are doing so that it would be easier to digest the information.
The current home page landed you on a feed where you could immediately jump in and begin interacting with the community and play around on the site. Unfortunately, we had a high bounce rate of users coming from a question page and then going to the home page. From our research, we began to understand that people making that action were now interested in learning more about Slant, but weren't getting what they needed because we landed them in the middle of the action.
The old, confusing Slant homepage.
The main sections of the new home page are the search bar, what we do, introduction to feeds, and the feed selector.
It was decided early to build these pages programmatically, but to get there took a lot of back and forth. The initial designs were influenced by design, but design was influenced by content, which made the early stages difficult.
A fun, interactive element that we developed for the home page is the tag selector. Through this selector, new community members are able to customize their home page feed, which we proved to be effective via a custom experiment that we delivered through emails.
The new tag selector that helped increase new accounts created by 89%.
Results
All of our actions at Slant are driven by data, so we always keep track of how users interact over time. Below area few of the stats that we used to measure success on this bproject. In addition to the ones below, we've had a noticeable increase in community retention after sign up.