Author Archives: nueconsoc

How Micro Content Can Immediately Improve Your Website

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Micro content isn’t teeny tiny type on a page – it’s actually the words we put on websites for things like buttons, tabs, menus, even page titles.

Recently we looked at the micro content we used on the 404 error page for the Postgraduate (PG) website.

Our analytics showed some people who followed a broken link (a deleted page) arrived at this error page and then immediately left the website.

Okay, so those people didn’t find the page they were looking for, but we follow best practice on our error page. We very politely give helpful links to the search, homepage and sitemap so people can still try to find what they are looking for.

So why did they leave immediately?

Review micro content

A quick review of the error page micro content revealed it was perhaps a bit negative:

Our old, negative, 404 error pageOur loud and proud micro content at the beginning of the page, didn’t encourage people to read further and use the links we had so helpfully provided.

The page was also a tad long to scan read so we changed it to:

Our new, confident and friendly, 404 error pageBy changing the micro content, we also made the error page follow the confident but friendly PG tone of voice the rest of the website uses.

Testing 1 2 3

We had several versions of the new error page, and ran these past a few people. The feedback resulted in a mashup of the different versions. Overall it’s a page that everyone felt works better.

Outstanding results

We added Google Analytics to the error page so we could tell if/when people started using the links instead and staying on the website… we had a brilliant results.

People stayed on the PG website – and six actually went on to start the application process!

So potentially, six new postgraduate students gained by changing micro content – that’s powerful stuff.

Take a look at the micro content on your website – is it saying what it needs to in the most effective way?

Have a go! What improvements can you make to your micro content?

Read more

This short but effective article, The first rule of web design by Seth Godin is worth a look. Its about making sure you use the right micro content for actions on your webpages – it certainly makes you think.

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Team Update: 1 – 15 April

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It’s time for a team update about what we’ve been working on over the last two weeks and what’s coming up.

Go Mobile programme

  • Tagging sites ready for migration –  batch one, including Research, Law School, Press Office, Institute for Sustainability is complete. And batch two is nearing completion for; Open Day, Information for Schools and Colleges, and last but not least About
  • A lot of detailed planning of the steps in the migration process itself and scoping out potential go-live dates for the first batches of sites
  • Calculating the time taken for each task to give us an accurate picture of the resources involved in the programme overall
  • Updating our giant whiteboard, on which we are tracking our progress in migrating batches one and two

Technical developments

  • The tech team (Catherine, Pete, Andy and Paul) have been moving the final template and components to its permanent home on the live server
  • They’ve also been making final preparations for the migration of the PG site into T4
  • We have also been getting ready to migrate batch one (four sites) into T4 and looking at the individual template requirements of each site

Training and support

  • The editorial team have been finalising training materials for the new Go Mobile programme
  • Anne is still working on training for the T4 CMS
  • We’ve received 24 support requests through the NU Service Helpdesk and have resolved 7 of them

Campaigns and web developments

There’s still a lot of business as usual!

  • Emma C has been working with colleagues in Marketing and Student Recruitment to plan homepage messages for the next few months
  • Steve has developed some external research pages on the Sage Faculty website
  • Emma C attended a demo of the remote user testing platform What Users Do
  • Jane has been reviewing some videos of external user testing of the PG website, and also writing a blog post about how much we hate FAQs (it’s true)

Travel-tastic

  • We enjoyed some time off for the Easter bank holidays – some team members travelled as far afield as Copenhagen, America, London and even good old Yorkshire

Plans for the next few weeks

  • Refining layout/design options for sites in Go Mobile
  • We’ll be carrying out post-migration checks on the first batch of sites in T4
  • Our editorial team are meeting to plan future content for this blog – let us know in the comments if there’s any topics you want us to cover

See you next time!

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Improving User Journeys on the Postgraduate Website

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The postgraduate (PG) website redevelopment initially began with a focus on improving the content and developing a strategy for content management. Mostly, this was to enable a more coherent user journey through the website – to improve the experience as a whole and encourage applications.

A consistent user experience

As the project got underway it became more and more obvious from our user research that we really needed the website to be optimised for mobile too.

To create a truly consistent experience, users of the website should be able to get the same experience and information no matter what device they use to view the site.
While we were trying to work out how we were going to do that, there was still some debate in the web development world about if you should or could just offer a separate mobile site. Immediately we decided that approach wasn’t helpful at all.

Project creep

The Postgraduate website goes mobile

The Postgraduate website goes mobile

Just imagine a user looking at the PG website on a desktop computer. Later they decide to go back and check some information using their phone.

What would their experience be like if we gave them a separate site? With a different structure and content? That really wouldn’t be helpful. Or coherent. Or easy to maintain.

So the work grew from a massive project of improving all the PG content and creating a PG content strategy, to also incorporating the ‘small’ technical demand of a mobile responsive website!

In 2010 Ethan Marcotte coined the term responsive design to describe a flexible, grid-based layout for a website that behaves differently depending on the device used to view it.

… It was a busy year.

Inspiring results

Now we have a really great, mobile responsive website with much improved content that we’re not only proud of, but has inspired the University’s Go Mobile project. Just a quick look at how our users are responding already (we launched at the end of October) shows, for mobile users:

  • average time spent on site has increased by a massive 240%. It was less than four minutes, now it is nearly 12
  • we’ve increased the number of pages viewed by nearly 22%

Watch this space

There were so many elements to the PG project that they merit separate blog posts, so in the coming months we’ll be sharing about how we:

  • wrote content for mobile devices (and improved the desktop reading experience)
  • created a tone of voice – and why
  • prioritized content layout for mobile optimization
  • kept sane (only kidding)

In the meantime you can visit the new PG website and discover the new features by taking a look at our PG case study presentation (PDF: 849KB) from the NU Digital event.

We’d love to hear your views about the new PG website, so feel free to leave a comment.

Update: 16 Nov 2015

Since this article was published, we’ve completed some user testing on the PG website. Check out our blog post about the great user testing results (hint: they love it).

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Introduction to User Research

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It’s fascinating to see people use our websites – it lets us see where they have problems and how we can make sites easier to use. We use this research to help us develop, structure and improve the usability of our undergraduate and postgraduate websites at Newcastle University.

We base our testing on training provided by the Nielsen Norman Group, a market leader in the user experience field.

But did you know that you only need five people to test a site?

That doesn’t seem many, but data from your first user gives immediate results – you’ve already learned almost a third of all there is to know about the usability of your design.

The second user will repeat some things with maybe a few new things, but you don’t learn as much as you did from that first user. Same goes for the third user, in fact the more users you have, the less you learn because you will keep seeing the same things again and again.

However, we can’t effectively test with just one user as you risk being misled by the specific behaviour of that single user.

So in this case at least, five is the magic number.

User Research topics

We will share case studies of the user research we’ve completed recently on our postgraduate and undergraduate websites, and how the findings directly informed changes to content, design and layout.

We’ll also take a look at the latest developments in user research – and let you know our plans for the next batch of user testing.

We may even be asking for volunteers…

In the meantime, take a look at this introduction to usability by the Nielsen Norman Group.

Suggest a topic

If there’s a topic you’d like us to cover – get in touch via the comments or via our website (University login required).  

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