Project Overview
In August of 2021, my team and I launched the website for OverCOME Mentors, a non-profit providing no-cost mentorship and career exploration workshops. The goal of the site is to engage, inform, and attract potential mentees, mentors, and donors.
Working as the designer and developer, I brought the site to life by leveraging insights from stakeholder interviews, evaluating analogous products, and utilizing program guidebook content.
Now that the site has been live for almost 6 months, it's a great time to dive into the site performance and see how it is aligning with the established goals.
Existing Landing Page
Data Scope
We looked at the data from November 10th (when we removed internal traffic) to December 29th, focusing only on users from the Bay area—the location of our primary user groups.
The Numbers:
Engagement Rate
- 102 unique sessions
- 71 of those sessions were engaged sessions (sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, or had 2 or more page views)
- 71/102 = 69.6% engagement rate.
When we dig deeper into how much time these users are spending on the site we find further evidence to consider:
Average Engagement Time
- Overall (14s)
- Home Page (9s)
- Who We Are (18s)
- Mentorship Program (8s)
- Workshop Series (18s)
- Resources (19s)
As we consider this data, it’s important to remember that the purpose of the site is to engage and inform. Evidently there's room to improve, particularly when it comes to our home and mentorship program pages.
Analysis
We have a small segment of users motivated to join our program through grassroots outreach, and they have been pointed to our site as a method of accessing an application.
In this context, more time on the site isn’t better. Motivated users arrive at our site with the intention of completing a “productivity” task, and signing up should take a short time for them to accomplish.
On the other hand, for users who might be learning about the program for the first time, more time spent is our goal. For the site to be serving its purpose well, we need to improve the substance and structure of our site content to better engage our users.
The Plan
Now we could….just rewrite the homepage and see how we do!
But no, granted with the luxury of more time than was available in our first iteration, we intend to approach our content from a strategic point of view.
What does approaching content from a strategic point of view look like?
It looks like making decisions that are informed by:
- Our past performance
- Our goals
- Good user research
We have a clear understanding of our goals and past performance.
We need to conduct user research that involves speaking with users in order to gain a clearer perspective of their context, motivations, and behaviors so we can make better, evidence based decisions with regard to our content and broader digital experience.
Coming Up
In the coming months, our team has scheduled user interviews with mentees at the beginning of the upcoming mentorship program.
The purpose of the interviews is to better understand our users’ motivations and context before joining a mentorship program. We also want to understand the associations our users have with our brand.
With these user research-based insights I plan to create new content for our site with the help of my team and conduct live A/B testing on our site.
Get In Touch
This project is in progress. Check back here in the coming months if you want to see what I find! And If you want to receive updates regarding this project, send me a message and I will make sure to keep you posted.