Migraine.com
Solving the problem of low community forums awareness and engagement by capturing organic traffic from informational articles with a new driving feature.
(Client)
Health Union
UX Lead
(My role)
Research
(Responsibilities)
Wireframing
User Testing
UI Design
Background
…Forums?
(Forums landing page)
Migraine.com is a website dedicated to providing information and resources for individuals suffering from migraines.
The website features a community forum where individuals can connect and share their experiences with others who have similar conditions. However, the forums are not easily discoverable on the website, and most users who find the site organically are only reading articles and dropping off quickly. This results in low engagement and user registration rates, which is an ongoing business problem for Migraine.com.
User awareness of forums is a problem.
Users who are not aware of the forums are missing out on the opportunity to connect with others who have similar experiences and receive support from the community.
Our challenge is to make forums more discoverable to users.
We need to make users aware that there is a robust community on the site and encourage them to engage with forum threads that may interest them.
Discovery & Research
Competitive Analysis Unearths a Huge Market Gap
Static house ads are not engaging.
To gain a better understanding of the current forum drivers on informational articles across Migraine.com, the team focused on pulling click-through rates for house banner ads that attempted to drive users to the forums. After synthesizing various different banners to account for unforeseen variables, we found that the average click-through rate for these ads was low at only 1.1%.
Survey says - users have no clue.
To gain a better understanding of user needs, the team conducted an annual "Tell us how we're doing" survey across the site. The survey found that users who were aware of the forums found them to be useful and visited them repeatedly. However, the majority of those surveyed were not even aware that forums existed on the site, indicating a significant gap in awareness and engagement.
We found a huge market gap.
Additionally, the team conducted a competitive analysis and found that having robust forums was a crucial market gap that Migraine.com could fill. We already had a great forum platform, we just needed users to find it. This led the team to focus on building a forums driver that would increase awareness and engagement within the forums.
(House ad driving to forums)
Goals
Business and User Goals Align
Awareness
To increase forums awareness, the project aims to increase traffic and click-through rates to the forums. By embedding engagement opportunities within content, the project seeks to bridge the gap between consuming content and driving forum engagement. This approach will help to raise awareness of the forums and drive more traffic to them over time.
Engagement
Increasing forums engagement is another critical goal of the project. By encouraging users to connect and engage with other users in the community about the topic they are reading, the project aims to create a more active and supportive community. This engagement will not only increase participation on the forums but also drive more traffic to the site.
Registration
Finally, the project aims to increase user registration rates. By making the forums more discoverable and engaging, the project hopes to encourage more users to register on the site and become active members of the community.
These established goals will ultimately lead to a more vibrant and supportive community which will not only benefit the business, but more importantly our users.
Registration prompt
Solutions
A New Feature is Born
Overall, the research and analysis conducted by the team provided valuable insights into user needs and pain points.
The low click-through rate of existing forum drivers and the lack of awareness among users indicated a need for a more effective and visible way to promote the forums. By understanding the importance of robust forums and the potential market gap, the team was able to make informed decisions in the redesign to increase awareness and engagement within the forums.
A new feature is born.
To solve the problems identified with the current design of the community forums for Migraine.com, several solutions were proposed. Firstly, a new feature will be created that is embedded within the actual article that the user is reading. This feature will be titled "forums" and will make it clear to the user that forums exist within the site.
Engagement is key.
Secondly, the feature will be designed to entice the user to visit the forums and engage with the community. This will be achieved by making the feature something to engage with, rather than just a static banner ad.
Solving for an ongoing business goal.
Thirdly, to access the forums, users will be required to join the community by registering. This will increase the number of registrations overall for the site, achieving the ongoing business goal of increasing user registration, while also creating awareness around the forum feature of the online community.
Exploration
An In-Article Forums Driver Engagement Feature
Preliminary sketching.
The ideation and design process for the forums driver involved testing multiple ideas to determine the best approach. Various iterations of how to solve for the problem ensued, with three different versions of possible forums drivers ultimately making it to the final rounds. These concepts included a “Fill in the Blank” engagement feature, “Question of the Day" concept, “Patient asks,” and “Connect with a Patient Like You” driver.
Four ideas and THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE.
The “Patient asks…” and “Connect with a Patient Like You" was tabled early on due to legal concerns around posting user-generated content and photos. The team decided to explore this feature in the future with more legal guidance.
We ended up testing the "Fill in the Blank" driver against a "Question of the Day" driver, and theorized that open-ended questions require more critical thinking than a fill in the blank prompt, which only requires a word or a phrase to complete the thought, resulting in less user fatigue. In some preliminary user testing, we placed both types of prompts on established social media platforms and found that both concepts received similar reactions and comments. Based on this result, and since the concepts were so similar, the team made the final decision to move forward with both, but combining them to fit a single concept. One heading, with flexibility to pose a question or include a fill in the blank, and have the heading read “Question of the Day”.
User Testing
No Educated Guessing Allowed
A major wording change.
The design process for the forums driver feature on Migraine.com involved user testing to determine the best approach. One consideration was what happens after the user submits their response? A working prototype was created, and a simple test was performed among participants. The results showed that most users preferred a success screen with the option to visit the forum thread, which would potentially yield more traffic to the thread.
Another key finding from user feedback was that the title of the driver, "Fill in the Blank," confused community members. The change to "Featured Forum" was made, and additional testing showed no confusion. Additionally, most users weren't happy with the interruption of the feature mid-article and asked that the feature be placed further down the page or entirely at the end of the article they were reading. To satisfy both business and user goals, a compromise was reached to place the driver ¾ of the way down the page instead of in the middle.
Overall, user feedback was instrumental in shaping the final design of the forums driver feature, ensuring that it was both user-friendly and effective in driving engagement.
Final Design
Success!
Decreasing disruption, and focusing on integration.
The user testings, as always, yielded pivotal results that ultimately dictated major decisions in the final design process. Starting with overall design, since users expressed a concern with feeling that the engagement feature was disruptive, or pulling them away from the content on the page, I wanted to be sensitive to these concerns and aimed to design the feature to “blend in” to the article. To achieve this, I opted for a subtle shadow around the feature instead of the gray box in previous versions which makes it easier for the eye to either skim over or jump in and engage. This also solved a potential business problem of the feature looking like an advertisement, or potential third party information versus an engagement feature hosted by Migraine.com.
Keeping the user informed with character counts and RED LINES.
We also decided to implement a character count, drawing from concerns from Migraine.com’s community leads that users could potentially leave pretty wordy responses, and this feature’s goal was to be a quick engagement on the page that was a low lift to the user. We also didn’t want to abruptly cut the user off from typing, so we decided to implement a live countdown, and once the limit was reached, the feature will allow the user to finish their thought and keep typing, but letting the user know that this is not permissible in three ways: the character count wording changing to “over limit”, the text input box color changing from blue to red, and the submit button becoming disabled.
Success indicator or redirect?
Based on our results from user testing the prototype, our suspicions were validated that a redirect to the forum after submitting a response would be too disruptive, and taking the user away from the article that they were reading could cause frustrations. We ultimately decided to implement a success screen, letting the user know that their response had been successfully submitted, and also giving the user the option to leave the page and visit the forum thread. Finally, we found that the user expected to see their response first after clicking this CTA, so after the click, the user is taken to their response within the thread (giving them the flexibility to scroll up/down to view other responses).
Results
The Importance of User-Focused Design
The proof is in the numbers.
Overall, the redesign of the forums drivers on Migraine.com has been a success, resulting in increased engagement and forum awareness among users, higher registration success rates, and positive feedback. These results demonstrate the importance of user-centered design and the value of incorporating user feedback into the design process.
After the forum drivers went live, Migraine.com saw a 40% increase in user engagement with the forums, as well as a 20% increase in community registration rates. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of user-centered design and the importance of incorporating user feedback into the design process.
The success of the redesigned forums drivers can also be seen in the feedback from the community. Many users have expressed their appreciation for the new design and the increased opportunities for engagement and interaction with other community members. The positive feedback has encouraged the Migraine.com stakeholders to continue to prioritize user feedback and to make further improvements to the site to meet the needs of its users.
After
Before
Looking ahead.
After spending quite a while working on this project, some future considerations that I voiced to stakeholders included possibly expanding the offerings of available engagement features on site given the success of the forums driver, streamlining the user registration process to make it even easier and more efficient to engage, and perhaps conducting some more robust user testing on exact placement of the engagement feature within article for optimization.