Proposed Big Fish Games.com redesign
Proposed Big Fish Games.com redesign
Overview
Big Fish is a pioneer in the casual games distribution business, but the website was designed to optimize the experience for existing Big Fish customers familiar with the brand. User testing and data has shown that the current webpage design was having a detrimental effect on conversion rates for new visitors to the site. In 2011, I was asked for proposed designs that could benefit new visitors without making it difficult for current Big Fish customers to navigate a redesigned site.
Results
Adapted versions of the global navigation and footer have been integrated into the current site, while other ideas are currently being considered for a phased rollout in the future.
Roles
User Experience, User Interface, Visual Design
In order to start identifying problems that new users were having, I examined Webtrends, search, and click density data to locate user patterns. This helped me prioritize which features and modules were most important to all users.
Looking at monthly search phrase data is also an invaluable way of determining what users are not able to find on their initial homepage visits.
My redesigned homepage simplified the header, sidebar, and footer navigation while reducing the number of modules and ineffective marketing slots. I created a new area below the main feature for the three top search terms, so visitors could quickly get to popular games and genres without having to search or scan. Modules that were used by both new and existing customers were combined to reduce the amount of visual clutter.
The previous two-tier global navigation was quite large and I observed many users in testing that had difficulty navigating or were missing the sub-navigation entirely. On tablets and phones, the old navigation took up as much as half of the viewable screen area. I chose to condense the navigation and remove the sub-navigation to help get more of the site content above the fold. A large drop down menu replaced the sub-navigation and gave users more obvious cues with large click areas.
An adapted version of my proposed navigation can be seen today on the current Big Fish website. The new navigation was an improvement for our desktop users as well as mobile users, who found a better experience navigating with the larger tap areas.
I wanted to adapt the product pop-ups from the Big Fish Games app on iOS, so I designed a “quick view” pop-up that would allow a user to display more information on any game without having to navigate away from the page they were on.
The redesigned category pages featured a more consistent visual hierarchy with a focus on curated, editorially chosen content.
The redesigned product page was largely informed by customer ranking of important page content: product images, description, and clear call-to-action buttons.