Rise of the Search Engine, Fall of the Homepage
About.com, a near-top-10 Web property now owned by New York Times Digital and used by one out of every five people on the Internet, asked Catalyst for help restructuring its entire site. In the era of Google, many of About's 20 million monthly visitors arrive at lower-level pages amidst the site's 23 channels and 50,000-plus topics. This meant that top-down navigation flowing from the homepage was no longer as effective in guiding people around the site. As a result, fewer visitors were penetrating the site deeply, limiting pageviews - an important metric for the site. In addition, About needed a more streamlined mechanism for managing site content and structure - particularly in this new search-engine-oriented context - given the fact that amidst its thousands of topics, there were effectively hundreds of different types of sites that people could visit. They also needed a new, fresher visual design that still corresponded with the brand they had built.

Services Provided

User Interface Design, Visual Design, Competitive Analysis, Audience Profiling, Persona Development, Interaction Strategy, Information Architecture

Methodology/Solution
After extensive analysis of About's traffic patterns, Catalyst collaborated closely with the company to profile the various types of visitors to the site, in order to better understand not only what people were looking for, but why they came and how they got there. Based on these profiles and related scenarios, Catalyst created user personae, an information architecture and UI templates that efficiently highlighted About navigation and resources even at the lowest-level pages. In essence, the new architecture turned every About page into a "front door," by closely correlating different types of user behavior (people seeking facts vs. those who were browsing) with different types of pages. This significantly-simplified architecture improved both traffic flow and site maintenance.

Benefits

• Gave About's web team a templated design that permitted constant manipulation of content and page elements in order to optimize traffic in real time.
• Provided a fresh but familiar visual design wrapper for the new architecture.
• Usability testing following About's re-architecture (conducted separately by About) indicated a high degree of user preference for the new "ubiquitous front door" strategy. People found it "clean" and "easier to look at."
• Improved About's core pageview numbers by approximately 100%.
• Improved About's pageviews in its highest-opportunity area, visits from search engines. Specifically, pageviews from Google visitors rose 30-40% following the implementation of Catalyst's design.

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