Siddharth
Asawa
Expertise
Data Analyst & UX Researcher
Tools
Team
3 members
Duration
Oct '20 - Dec'20 (9 weeks)
Intro
Mural Routes is the only member-based not-for-profit arts service organization in Canada dedicated to the creation, development and promotion of public wall art.
My Role
I analyzed Google Analytics data
Also created the Interactive Dashboard
Identified key findings
Designed mockups for recommendations.
Problem
Major Usability issues affecting user experience & user flow
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Deeper content not easily discoverable.
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Lacking user flow and improper mental model of Map page.
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Ineffective strategy execution on social media page.
Impact
Increased user engagement to 2K views/day and lowered the exit rate by 32%
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Improved ease of use, maximized user-engagement and lower exit rate with the help more clickable contents for better user flow.
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Made deeper content more discoverable through effective navigation.
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Increased overall user engagement of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
Approach to the Goal
Methodology
Link to website : https://muralroutes.ca/map/
Get a Glance
Dashboard
Findings: Google Analytics
Who are the users?
Audience Overview
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Almost half of the users are from the age range of 25 or below. Younger audiences are the top users of Mural Routes website.
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Female users (58.5%) dominants Male users(41.5%).
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53.6% are desktop users whereas 43.1% used mobile. Tablet users are negligible.
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68% of users are from the Canada and most of users (31.4%) are from Toronto.
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Top 3 international visitors are from US, Philippines and India
Fig.1 User Demographics
What they do?
Behavior Overview
Fig.2 Top Mural Page views and Average Time
Fig.3 Top Ten Google Search Queries Fig.4 Top Ten Website Search Terms
Fig(2) shows the top Mural Page views by user. Another figures(3 & 4) shows top ten search terms on google and website respectively. Time frame analysis was from 15th November- 8th December, as it wasn’t configured before this date. Our team recommended Mural Routes to enable the service as it would be easy for them to track the keywords used by users and optimize their SEO ranking.
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Rainbow Tunnel was the most visited page by user and also one of the most time spent page(3.51mins) by user.
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“Philip cote” and the “Mural Routes” were the top google search term used by users.
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Whereas on the website, users searched for different murals information.
Finding #1
Map Page is one of the most popular pages but has a lot of drop-offs.
Fig.5 User Flow through Map Page and Analysis of Map Page as a Landing Page
Map page is one the most viewed pages on the website(1,046) with a bounce rate of 71% and Exit of 53%. It has the huge drop offs of 303 users from 393 total visited. This shows there are some issues on page, so while digging further on the map page, we can know:
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Important information about the murals is limited and thus the lack of interactivity.
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There are very slender details to interact with in the murals section thus giving limited opportunity to navigate through the website.
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Details of each mural are not sorted according to the filters above. That could create inconsistency in design and confusion among users affecting overall user experience.
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There are very slender details to interact with in the murals section thus giving limited opportunity to navigate through the website.
Fig.6 User Journey through Map page
User Journey plays an important role to track users navigating on a website. Image shows that very few people prefer mural description pages as their next page. We think that this further backs evidence to the findings that page lacks interactivity and inconsistency but we recommend some user testing and further research to test these hypotheses.
Recommendation #1
Create more clickable contents below the murals to increase user engagement.
In the following mockup, we recommended to add the style, organization, and Mural Routes Member information below the photo of each mural, which matches the boxes of the filter. Besides, to make each category clickable to encourage users to browse more, and therefore it may increase the average user session and time duration.
Fig.7 Recommendation for the
Map Page
Finding #2
Mural description pages have high bounce rate and large drop-offs
Fig.8 Mural description pages Landing page and User Flow analysis
Mural description page is one the most popular pages on Mural Routes. And among them
“rainbow-tunnel” has the highest number of pageviews (1,257) and average time on page (03:50 mins). But at the same time has a high bounce rate (85.68%) and drop-offs. When digging deeper into the page(Fig.9) Interactive elements were missing. There was no attractive clickable element to interact with for users to engage or to navigate through websites.
Fig.9 Current Design of the Mural Page Fig.10 Recommendation for Mural Page
of ‘Rainbow-tunnel’ of ‘Rainbow-tunnel’
Recommendation #2
Add more interactive contents on mural pages to keep user engaging
The reason for the high bounce rate and the drop-offs for the mural pages may be there is only photo and description of the mural, which are not clickable. In order to reduce the drop-offs and encourage users to browse more, one feasible improvement can be adding and emphasizing more interactive contents on the mutual page. For example, changing the Organization of ‘’Mural Routes”, text based Rob Matejka’, to a link. See below figure 10
Findings: Design Insights
Finding #3
The design of icons, buttons lacks discoverability & consistency and list of Mural Routes member filter on map page is unsorted
Fig.11 Map Page Sort Issues Fig.12 Submit and Social Media Button Issues
Designing consistently and user friendly is really important to enhance overall user experience and make the task easy for users. Fig.11 shows a sorting problem in the dropdown menu of selecting members. Fig.12 shows that social media sharing button are hard to discover. Also in order to allow users to make use to feature, it should be easily noticeable. There are quite inconsistency and discoverability issues in icons and buttons.
About
My Name is Siddharth Asawa (Sid). I'm a graduate student at Pratt Institute, M.S.(Master of Science) in Information Experience Design (IxD) course. Currently I'm interning at pharma startup as a lead UX/UI designer.
I'm also looking for Full time opportunity as UX, UI or Product Designer.
I'm passionate about improving people's lives by design.
I constantly learn new things every day and enjoy meeting people who are inspired and unafraid to share their ideas with the world.
I have 2 years of experience in the conceptualization and development of digital products, marketing and branding to help companies and nonprofits grow their impact potential. Works with solid background in interface design, brand design and front end development of product management, facilitation & prototyping.
As hobby, I like hearing different genre music, playing video games, cooking and watching movies and sports.
Recommendation #3
Sort Mural member filter list alphabetically also Make Social Media Sharing buttons more discoverable and make icons, buttons design consistent
To solve this problem, rearranging the mural routes members in the alphabetical order is important for users to quickly find the artist they are looking for. This change can definitely improve the user experience on finding a mural of a certain artist and move up the social media sharing button near the photo for the mural page. In this way the button can be discovered easily and the actions can be more fluent.
In this way the button can be discovered easily and the actions can be more fluent.
In this mockup, we not only move up the social media sharing button just below the photo, which makes more people discover it; but also, we enable the text-based categories to links, which allows users to find relevant murals and encourages them to spend more time browsing the website. Moreover, the design of icons and buttons is corrected to be more consistent.
Fig.13 Design Recommendation
Findings: Social Media
Finding #4
Facebook Findings
Most posts that were posted in September & early October received the most engagement. In Fig 14., the graphs show how the most engaged posts dated back to late September and as time went on post engagement decreased and same trend is followed on Fig 15.
Fig. 14, 15 Weekly Charts by Facebook
Recommendations
Increase frequency of posts during summer and early fall time period as more people engage with posts at this. Possibly due to warmer weathers which allows them to go participate in events and view murals comfortably.
Fig.16 Example of Facebook Post
Finding #5
Instagram Findings
Carousel Albums have more engagement than single image and video. Many of the posts are missing links back to the original site.
Fig.17 No. of Instagram profile reach, views, and new followers by date
Fig.18 Highly viewed post with no links back to site.
Recommendations
Increase use of photos and carousel albums as it quicker for the audience to digest and react to an image rather than video. The engagement, such as profile reach, views, likes, and new followers, is largely increased when promoting an artist or event. Links redirecting to muralroutes.ca should be included with all posts to get maximum exposure.
Fig.19 Instagram Engagement by Media Type
Fig.20 Instagram Post with hyperlink to main Mural Routes. (Highlighted in red box).
Lessons Learnt
Reflection
The Mural Map of Canada is an amazing project which provides an open and resourceful platform for both artists and mural arts lovers. In order to improve a better user experience of the website, the team of Pratt Institute use Google Analytics, FB insights, Twitter Insights, and Instagram Insights to learn more about the users of the website.
This student project was not without major challenges and huge learning opportunities. Google Analytics can tell a lot about user behavior but not why they came to the site and their personal interests. Same goes for Social insight tools and also how users the engaging with different social media is kind of hard to know.
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When our Pratt research group began the project, an initial challenge was the need to define what metrics would be most useful to focus on because it is very easy to start drowning in all the data that Google Analytics can provide. After setting the key demographic and behavioral metrics, it became clearer where to go with the direction of dashboards. Google Data Studio was the second big learning moment. Juggling the data for all seven segments was made much simpler by using Google Data Studio. Being able to copy each dashboard and simply switch the segment filter saved time and energy and allowed the desired data to be visualized consistently across every segment.
Despite some limitations of the tools. Google Analytics, Google Data Studio and Social Insights allow for a useful method of web user evaluation and data visualization that can easily be replicated for repeat studies and compared over time.
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