In order to boost the SEO of the owned media of pairs, the leading Japanese dating app, I was in charge of redesigning the website on mobile view by providing a better user experience with a more succinct UI to increase traffic.
UX Researcher UI Design Visual Design
Photoshop
January 2016 - April 2016
The essence of SEO is to enhance user experience. ・・・・・・・・・・・・ In order to do so, as a UI/UX designer, it is important to think from a user's point of view. Hence, I thought from all aspects of user's perspective while I was redesigning the website, from visual design, first view, readability, to navigation.
As a media website, it is obvious that if we did not provide the articles that matched the audiences' needs, they would not be interested to continue reading.
As a result, it is crucial for our audiences to be able to grasp the content of our article with the first glimpse. However, it was hard to judge what content we have with the first view of our media website before the redesign.
Before the redesign, the first view was occupied by banners and links that were unrelated to the actual contents of the article.
We started with looking at the CTR and CVR of those banners and links then decided the priority of each banner and link to decide which ones to leave on the website. We deleted the banners with low CVR, CV, and CTR as well as links that were not being clicked.
Besides from being occupied with a lot of unrelated information, what we wanted to convey to the audiences with the first view was also not clear. For instance, the eye-catching image was too small, and the size of the title was not big enough. It was difficult for the users to know where to start reading the article.
Thus, I put in the abstract underneath the eye-catching image. A 7-line abstract makes it clear what our articles are about with just a glance. In addition, by enlarging the eye-catching image and the title, the content stands out with a more balanced design.
Before the redesign, the first view was filled with texts, which created an impression of too many words, discouraging our audiences from continuing to read.
It is said that human is a very visual animal which obtain 80% of the information through vision. Hence, it is a must to enhance the visual design to attract audiences interests. I changed what was originally a text into icons, including changing the category into color coded icon, and changing the view number into an eye icon, reducing the texts, making it much more intuitive through visual design. With the decrease of the texts, the first view screen becomes much more organized, reducing the volume of the information.
Moreover, our media site consists of information about relationships. In order to give a soft feel to our audiences, I redesigned the color scheme and the shape of the share button, making the characteristic of the website more coherent. I used baby blue as the main color, unified the shape of objects into round shapes, and also added some tags which were lacking. Though this is a media website about relationships, I tried to make the design not too girly, so that both guys and girls could enjoy.
The redesign was more than what listed above, including adding a menu that navigates directly to each section, the paging, and unlimited scroll to increase engagement.
Check out the redesigned website on a smartphone!
The essence of SEO is to enhance the user experience. In order to do so, as a UI/UX designer, it is important to think from a user's point of view. Whether the page looks aesthetically appealing, the main point of the content is easy to comprehend, the design helps make the website easier to read, and the website is easy to navigate or use, a successful UI/UX designer should think from all aspects of user's perspective.