Web Redesign
Overview
I was contracted to redesign SAP’s early-stage startup accelerator’s website because their dropoff rate was unusually high. By conducting UX research on their target demographic, startup founders, I created UI designs that increased overall sessions on the website by 25% and 2.5% in session duration.
About
SAP.iO is SAP's venture and innovation arm. They offer accelerator programs globally to help startups scale with SAP and bring innovation to their customers.
Problem
SAP.iO’s current website structure needed to reorganize its content to better serve the use cases in their target market. While their page views were high thanks to strong SEO, they were seeing a big dropoff on the landing page. We needed to understand why our users weren't engaging with the website.
Only 35% of visitors visit another page and the average duration stays around 1 minute.
Roadmap
Observational Interviews
To figure out the pain points of the current web design, I scheduled observational interviews and surveys with startup founders, the main target user for SAP.iO's accelerator. Right off the bat, I started noticing similarities across them all–terminology was confusing, nobody knew that they offered an accelerator program, and the landing page provided little to no upfront value because of a long list of startup logos filling up majority of the real estate.
Competitive Analysis
Analysis of multiple competitors on their navigation structure, CTA, and program copy provided further proof on the areas that were lacking on SAP.iO’s current home page. Almost all competitors followed a very similar pattern where they started with a strong mission statement, CTA pointing to the program, as well as program benefits/details.
Navigation Map
To tackle one of the major pain points, I broke down user actions with a navigation map to approach the landing page as a central access hub. If the landing page navigation is intuitive and easy to comprehend, the chances of dropoff due to confusion could be lower.
Quick insights
The map was very lengthy with 4 different layers of access.
The landing page had no clear direction for a visitor to head towards and the mission statement is vague.
The majority of the page was devoted to external links (red) that redirected users off the site.
The only strong CTA took you to their diversity initiative, but not a direct transfer to applying to the program.
Designs + Usability Testing
Because the website was built on Wordpress and SAP.iO did not have a dedicated web team yet, I formatted the lo-fi mocks in a more modular format to reduce complexity and used patterns already common on that platform.
It was important to get feedback on usability every step of the way, so I incorporated usability testing after every major checkpoint to help narrow down which approach was the most effective.
Results
After conducting 3 rounds of testing, one in lo-fi and two in hi-fi, the final design was proposed to stakeholders for approval before going live.
Within one month, we saw an increase in overall sessions on the website by 25% and 2.5% in session duration due to simplifying navigation, updating the mission statement, and including CTA to apply to the program.
What I learned
Presenting your work to stakeholders is similar to creating a case study, especially in a contract position at a larger company. Your proposals need to be backed by strong evidence and research to move the needle in a significant way and data points need statistical significance to be taken seriously.