Who: worked with the Director of Web, Web Strategist and the Content Team
Problem: The TIBCO homepage needed an update, HotJar indicated that people were not scrolling and we suspected it was content that was stale and did not resonate.
Solution: For the past few years we’ve been working with a vendor to run a/b testing. I collaborated with the web strategist who worked closely with the A/B vendor. In our previous designs, we wanted to answer the questions of who TIBCO is and what TIBCO does, but in this revisit, we needed to take it further and explain how TIBCO enables potential customers to succeed—answering the question of why choose TIBCO.
A comforting element from previous designs, combined with the new colors, content and layout resulted in marketing form submits up 9.3%, our Cloud Trial signups up 6.5%, and our "Contact Us" submits were up 9.1%.
We didn’t have a UX designer when we kicked off this project, so I wireframed our recommendations in XD. One of the things I thought worked against us, was we didn’t have content refreshed frequently enough, so I suggested a widget that automatically shows our latest blog posts.
In this revisit of the homepage, we also wanted to explore more parallax and interaction.
Since we are a data company, thought it prudent to back up our claims with data, just like we back up our design choices with A/B testing and data. The second thing we wanted someone to see, was some accomplishments that were achieved with three of our main products. If more product teams could provide more statistics, we would make these auto-change on fresh, to keep content fresh.
Once the wireframes were approved, I researched latest design trends and incorporated them into three different themed visual designs that leaned into different areas of the brand.
01 A typography-based cloud theme focusing on the brand of TIBCO
02 A tricolor theme focusing on our Connected Intelligence Pillars
03 A “safer” theme closer to our existing design
Reinforcing our decisions with data was core to this redesign. Once a design was chosen, we did a few more iterations and then finalized. We started out with a couple variants against the control, including a persistent side quick links against our already established horizontal quick links. The side quick links won and we incorporated them into the new design
We wanted to add more user interactions on the home and small delightful animations as we felt our old page was too static. One of my suggestions was to replace the standard customer carousel with a more interactive tabbed layout. On scroll, the customer image blurs, revealing a quotation from one of our customers. Tests and feedback from our A/B testing indicated higher engagement when we showcased quotations from customers. Hovering on the different logos changes the customer quotation, providing a simple interaction that is reinforced by third party validation.
Another interactive element we wanted to add to our page was our self-sorting guide that tested really well on a secondary page. Unfortunately, that engagement did not translate well to the homepage. Users were just not ready for that in their buying journey. On full rollout we removed that section.
One of my theories of low homepage scroll and engagement was that visitors, especially repeat visitors, didn’t scroll because our content didn’t change. Since neither creative or web was in charge of content, and it’s difficult to convince other teams to provide new content on the regular, I suggested a scalable solution of syndicating some of our latest blog posts on the homepage. This session would be automatically refreshed every time a new blog post was published, and the large section could be manually overwritten if we wanted to showcase an event like TIBCO NOW, or any other announcement.
Another way to encourage new content and leverage social proof was to highlight our latest analyst wins. In this section, we would have new opportunities on the regular to showcase our lead products regularly.
Once the visual design was approved, the web team and the vendor set up the test and not all the news was great. When going into the visual design, I insisted on the clean look of a navigation without a background. While engagement was up on the page, our main CTA in the navigation, wasn't testing well. We kept the test going, changing the color of the button, and even though it improved, it still wasn't where we wanted it. Begrudgingly, I brought back a nav background, that we use on our other pages and that was the missing piece.
A comforting element from previous designs, combined with the new colors, content and layout resulted in marketing form submits up 9.3%, our Cloud Trial signups up 6.5%, and our "Contact Us" submits were up 9.1%.