European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) creates and gathers numerous resources, statistics, and tools to help make equality between women and men a reality for all Europeans and beyond. I had the opportunity to work on the evaluation and redesign of their website with 4,000+ daily visitors and thus helped contribute to our world achieving the Global goal #5.
individual:
design proposals, competitor benchmarking, web analytics analysis
with a team:
user research, usability testing
Aug - Nov 2021 (4 months)
Our challenge was to holistically understand EIGE’s website performance: its strengths, weaknesses and potential for further development. Based on the analysis to come up with ideas for improvement.
Our project covered only the orange part of the double diamond.
In 2022 a different contractor continued with the rest of it.
EIGE's goal is to provide high quality research and data to support better informed and evidence based decision-making by policymakers and other key stakeholders working to achieve gender equality.
Although they are not the most numerous visitors, their focus is on the EU policymakers.
Policy makers and knowledge experts have very limited time availability, which made research challenging. We managed to do 6 user interviews and 3 quantitative surveys but still had to rely quite much on static methods, expert analysis and our hypotheses.
Our research showed users are already quite satisfied with the website (NPS 40), which is a testimony to EIGE's hard work. However, there were still some serious issues, such as overwhelming navigation or poor content presentation usually in a form of exhausting text.
In order to make some of the issues more understandable, we created design proposals with our ideas for solutions.
Our survey showed us that around 32% of users are not able to find what they are looking for. During our interviews, participants expressed having to rely on search because they felt overwhelmed by the navigation. Web analytics showed us many pages from the navigation menu have extremely low visits number.
The current navigation is using dropdown format, which goes as deep as 5 levels. As it requires hovering over lines, it is not very accessible and during testing we observed users struggled with it. It currently does not have a visual hierarchy and testers told us, they do not want to bother with going through all of the menu items. One last problem is that the information architecture follows an organisational structure rather than user's mindset.
Our proposal was to use only 2 level megamenu format with items divided into columns following users' needs. Some of the menu elements should be renamed, the ones with low visits removed from navigation, and deeper level elements could be transformed into in-page links. Based on the best-practices observed from other EU institutes we suggested moving numerous menu items into About EIGE and mentioning them again in the footer.
Although content exploration issue occurs on the whole website, missed opportunity was especially apparent on the homepage. Heat-maps showed us very few people scroll below the page fold. Most participants from user research said they do not scroll down, even though there is a lot of useful information.
Currently, in the hero section we have news articles, which are few months deprecated. People have learned that they change rarely, so they stopped scrolling down. Rest of the homepage is not very enticing, as it hides content behind links and lacks visual and interactive elements.
Overall, it is unclear who the homepage is for: exploration by general public, or for professionals to help them with their workflow? It is missing stronger focus on the Topics and Projects, which are among top EIGE priorities.
To help users discover the most important and new information, we suggested promoting resources in a more prominent way. By extracting one or two key information we not only let users have a glimpse at the content but already provide them with new information, which is currently hidden behind meta describing hyperlinks.
In the hero section, instead of promoting news articles only, featured content could be presented here, such as an important event, new publication, or data resource. Basically resources that are the reason why our primary users come to this site at this time.
Rest of the homepage could be promoting the most important content from all of the web sections. This will help users get a sneak peek into them, find out what is new or what EIGE is about.
.png)
As European Institutes have difficult processes and policies, it took a while for them to make changes. With our data and proposals as a starting base plus a few consultations, the next contractor worked with EIGE on a new website and you can preview it live. The homepage and navigation are highly inspired by our proposals.
In projects like this, it might be very difficult to empathise with users, as we are not one of them. In order to design the right solution, the parts of the research where users are involved are very important.
If your target user group is very specific (like policy makers in our case), try to start recruiting them for interviews/testing as soon as possible, as they are not easy to find or have very limited availability.
For me it was also the first time I got my hands on analytic tools, learned about NPS, SEO and site performance analysis.
