Decreasing the bounce rate by 11% on the landing page

Incorporating a design thinking approach.

Analysing the data

Since this is a relatively new site I've built from scratch, I want to incorporate everything I've learned from my professional life and tackle every issue with a design thinking approach. Creating a strong foundation and building out the right systems from the very beginning.

This is why I try to refer to the analytics every week and see if anything has changed based on the changes I've made. I define the problems, create an iteration, and test to see if my assumptions are correct.

Understanding the need

The concept of the site is to let designers share their career paths and how they got to where they are now. Not wanting to waste too much time, I built and launched with a relatively empty landing page to help validate my idea. Thankfully, several designers were open to the idea, even thankful for me reaching out to them.

Although I had several designers agree to collaborate with me, when I looked at the data I noticed that the bounce rate was quite high. At times reaching heights of 62%. Meaning they would land on the page and not go further and see what else was on the site. This was understandable as I had quickly built the site to allow me to launch early.

Since my original idea was validated, it was time for me to build out the rest of the site with the hope of lowering the bounce rate and allowing the readers to traverse the site more easily.

Building additional views

When I initially launched there were only 6 pages on the site:

1. / - The first page of the site
2. /blog - A space for articles
3. /share - A place to allow designers to reach out and share their story
4. /about - Where I introduce myself and the intentions of the site
5. /privacy - Simple privacy page
6. /[designer] - Each designer's page where they share their story.

Since I designed the database myself, I knew that I could create additional pages to pad out the site. For example, each designer on the site would list out the many different apps they use to help them design. Knowing this, I could easily create a new page that would visualise and list the top-rated apps based on all the designers.

I could also create a page dedicated to the full list of designers and show just a snippet on the first page. Again, giving readers a reason to navigate around the site and reduce the bounce rate even further. With the additional pages, I could then add more sections on the landing page allowing me to write additional content, which is great for SEO, plus guide readers to click and check out the rest of the site.

With that being said, the site now includes the following pages:

1. /
2. /about
3. /designers - A list of designers
4. /designers/[designer] - Each designer's page where they share their story.
5. /tools - A list of the popular apps used by the designers.
6. /learn - renamed from /blog
7. /share
8. /privacy

Cleaning up the navigation

Both the About and Privacy pages originally sat in the footer, don't ask me why I did that. Also as I was cutting corners the mobile navigation paid for it as it wasn't the best experience. Knowing that the majority of my readers were consuming the site using their mobile devices, I had to cater the updates to a mobile-first approach and clean things up a little.

Looking at the data I also noticed that users were checking out the /about page, which indicated that it made sense it sat in the main navigation when on desktop. On top of that, I updated the mobile navigation with a better design and animation allowing for a better experience.

The old navigation

The new updated navigation

The outcome

With all the subtle changes implemented, I noticed an immediate effect to the data. The bounce rate had dropped drastically as well as more readers were viewing the /about page. Of course, there could be other factors that I'm unaware of that helped boost the analytics. Regardless, I will continue to view the data, define the problem, make small iterations and test to see if my assumptions were correct or not.