We earlier described the long iterative process it was to redesign just a banner on the front page of motigo.com. We recently launched the last part of the front page redesign, which was a result of an even longer iterative task of trial and error.

The starting point for the front page redesign in the start of May 2007 was:

*We had several things that we wanted to change in the old layout.*

• We wanted to promote the “Developer blog”:http://devblog.motigo.com
• We wanted to get rid of the bottom “how it works” box that explained that you could signup and get access to our services - only through icons. It was an idea that looked good in the eyes of our designer, but confused more than did good in the eyes of our users
• With the new front page top banner, it did not make sense to have the signup box so close to the signup-button of the top banner
• The graphics that showed how the blind-down worked was outdated - and is soon to be irrelevant (oops - did I say too much?)
• The static content explaining what motigo.com was all about was more confusing more than explaining.

As soon as we had the change, we changed what we could and removed the bottom “how it works” box, put in a box printing an excerpt of the latest developer blog post, and moved the blue signup banner down lower on the page.

But, what is motigo?

When conducting “heuristic evaluations”:http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_evaluation.html on motigo.com or in other words: When letting potential users browse motigo.com in order to find usability issues, the most often heard quote was: “But what do you do? What can I use the site for?”. Admittedly, this is far from the result we wanted to hear, why we took immediate measures to improve the general usability of motigo.com. The frontpage is only the first of many great changes to come.

Even though we in clear text explained what motigo was on the front page, users answered that they didn’t understand what our concept was. They admitted that the new “frontpage banner”:http://devblog.motigo.com/2007/04/27/redesigning-the-front-page-v1/ had helped dramatically on their understanding, but that they could still use some more guidance. It came clear to us that our visitors did not all visit our “about pages”:http://motigo.com/about/services to find out what motigo is, but sometimes gave up on the front page, when they could not find an immediate answer.

We needed to more clearly communicate what motigo is about - without too many unnecessary distractions. Based on heuristic evaluations and what our analysis told us, we agreed to concentrate on showing:

• *Screenshots* of our services
• *Explanations* of each service and motigo.com *that make sense*
• An excerpt of our Developer blog, as this communicates who we are and what we stand for
• Easy access to sign up

Finding a way to show screenshots of our services in a manner that matches the cleanness of our general look and feel was a dificult task. We had several solutions up on the table:

*Proposal 1:* Looked clean, but did not give room to explanations of each service.

*Proposal 2:* Trying out the bubble layout from our about pages. It unfortunately did not fit all of our services in the way we wanted.

*Proposal 3:* Showing the screenhots alone without too much extra graphics turned out to be a good solution. At the same time, we could put in explanations of each service neatly together with each screenshot.

*Proposal 4:* Adding the color code of each service gave the final touch that added the right amount of style and nice feel to our front page that we feel suit motigo. It also helped show that we use colors to distinguish between our services and what those color codes are.

When inserting the new screenshots and accommodating explanations of each service, the frontpage came to look like this:

We are very happy with the result and have now started working on a redesign of the webmaster administration area, that will bring coherency into play and give a great overview of all your motigo services.

We also have plans to create tutorials and guided tours for each of our service.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 1:18 pm by Anders Toxboe and is filed under How we work, Usability, Motigo updates. 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.