Prateek Dayal

Last few months have been very interesting as we had been working hard on a new Muziboo that we finally launched yesterday. It was very exciting because this is the first Muziboo design where we have worked with a professional designer and there has been a lot of learning involved. This will be a series of posts where I will write about the Why, How and What of the redesign. I am hoping to turn this into a discussion and see what others think about the whole process and where we could have done better.

Starting Point

Muziboo has a lot of professional musicians and the website serves as a portfolio for a lot them. Some people have actually managed to talk to prospective clients through the website. Lately there had been many requests for 128 kbps streaming and a couple of other features like reuploading, private sharing etc which make a lot of sense for professional musicians. We therefore rolled out the pro account beta and were working towards releasing it to everyone. Before the release however we thought of polishing up the UI a bit and started looking at things we can improve from usability perspective. The research led into a lot of insights and we decided to redo the whole UI.

Analyzing the Logs

We started with google analytics to find out what we can improve. Google analytics has some pretty neat tools available to help you identify weak pages in your website. These are pages with high exit rates and bounce rates. There are some bounces that you cannot help but there are other that can be helped. To know this, we looked at the bounce/exit rates for different keywords and entry sources. On some of the pages, there were bounces for keywords that we actually serve. We also found that the referral traffic converted pretty well and came to a conclusion that people who come after reading about muziboo or by clicking on our widgets convert well. Putting these two observations together, we came to a conclusion that some of the pages were not conveying the correct picture and orienting the user well. Another interesting observation was that every page that had little or no related content had high exit rate.

Talking to the users

Next we talked to a lot of our user to know what they liked about Muziboo and what more they would wanna see. We asked them about their first impressions of the place and what made them stick on. Most of these discussions reinforced the feeling that most people value the community here the most. Another learning was that most musicians value charts a lot and that was something missing in Muziboo.

Armed with all this learning we set out to do a complete overhaul of Muziboo. We decided to work extensively on improving the usability and also the look and feel of the site. Another thing that we decided to focus on was the interaction design to make sure that as the site grows the personal feeling does not go down.

In the next post, I would be writing about the specific changes that we did to improve the usability and interaction and how eating our own dog food helped us a lot :)

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Tags: interaction design, muziboo, redesign, usability

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under design, muziboo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.