OPMOM Case Study

There's a reason many people fear change: Not all change is good, and even less change is

welcome. After a difficult migration from ASP.NET to Drupal, opmom.com (now thetastefullife.com) needed to take stock of its goals. We reviewed the website with an emphasis on how the site was meeting its mission, then examined its functionality and identified opportunities for growth.

Services

Experience Strategy
Heuristic Evaluation

Usability Testing
Eye Tracking

In the competitive analysis we used simulated eye tracking, to compare the intensity of a user's interaction, what we call "levels of engagement," between the existing OPMOM website and other, similar websites.

We found that the OPMOM home page didn't engage users with the same intensity as the other websites. This was easily fixed using a larger, more compelling main feature image.

We increased advertising space by over 750%.

Next challenge: Paying the bills without selling out. OPMOM's owners feared making the page look "tacky" with too many large ads, so the original design incorporated only a few, tiny advertisements. Unfortunately, such timid advertising attracted little user interest and few click throughs. We showed them that they could increase their advertising real estate without sacrificing the visual attractiveness or integrity of the site. (By which we mean to say we increased advertising space by more than 750%. Not too shabby!)

Visitors to the site now get tastefully-presented opportunities to learn more about products and services that are important to them. And advertisers have additional high-value opportunities to promote their products or services, generating much-needed revenue for the site.

We conducted user interviews.

We conducted remote user interviews (using Feedback Army & Amazon's Mechanical Turk) to evaluate the appeal of the website, determine if OPMOM's website objectives were immediately obvious and to identify which aspects of the site confused users.

Visitors to the site now experience more prominently-featured information that's just right for the target audience.

We provided suggestions for how to create more useful error messages.

In fact, the report came complete with a prioritized list of suggested enhancements, all wrapped up in a bow for the site's developer. How easy is that?

Error Messaging - Before
Before