Usability matters! JoomlArt.com site design improvements

Finally we got it out! Surely you have noticed from the homepage that we have changed the design several days ago. Thanks to the design team for their creative effort to improve accessibility for visitors. This is a major design refinement since our Joomla site update from June 2010.

I believe users are always the best UI/UX experts you can ever find. They are telling you the truth that are translated in your analytics data. Study them and you cannot go wrong. So what are the MAIN ACTIONS we want users to do when they visit our site?

I'd like to share some thoughts about clear desired actions a visitor would ideally follow depending on how far he is already engaged with JoomlArt!

Goal 1: Understand our portfolio. Really fast!

Desired actions are:

• Browse all template designs visiting showcase page
• Watch live demo
• Watch our videos

These steps will help visitors (especially new) to understand our products in a friendly way. By providing more intuitive navigation we can lower bounce rates, increase overall stay time and revisiting chances.

Goal 2: Join JoomlArt's community (FREE) and connect with us

Now users know what we have on offer, have tried around we can plan for the next step. Desired actions are:

• To sign up free membership to access our public forums and interact with others.
• Follow our blog feeds, product update feeds via RSS
• Connect with our social channels and video channel on Youtube.
• Subscribe to our newsletter.

The Awesome Goals

• Goals towards the end of the goal funnel would be to make users learn about pricing in a straight forward manner. Not to let them wonder what's going on and doing any maths.
• And the final "ubergoal" of course; to signup without pain.

Those goals are about to be improved soon backed by analytical proof. We will plan a detailed A/B testing to find out the optimal site design with highest conversion and performance.

Let's get into some details for the current refinements. Read the about new major features below.

I. Front Page

(Refer image above) The bulky carousel has been replaced now by a spacious product slide. Instead of talking about club info stats and other fluffs we have put the 3 latest templates into the featured area with a more intuitive call to action which asks users to view live demo or read info first:

1. Main navigation: Now if you click on the club buttons you will land directly on the showcase page instead of the template list page that contained too of much text.
2. "Browse All Templates" button is also redirecting to the main funnel, i.e. showcase. It shows us from analytics that showcase has much longer visiting time than any other product list pages. Further if you want to have a quick sneak preview, click on the black bar "More Templates" below to preview thumbs of latest 8 templates with the option to navigate directly to those you like.
3. Save time and view Live Demo or Template Info immediately with one click from the featured product slide area. This increases immensely one desired behavior, which is. to check latest product in action.

We have also created separate feeds for the blog, Joomla Templates & Extensions, Drupal and Magento products as well. Subscribe to only one specific category you are interested in.

II. Showcase

Studying our analytics we could learn that our showcase section is by far the most important place for users to get a quick overview of all our designs. For new visitors this is crucial as they don't have the time or simply don't have the mood to load through pages to find out what is on offer. For existing members they favor this page and can make fast decisions on which design to take for their next project. We have improved usability of showcase with following features:

4. Search functionality: Now you can search for template titles to quickly find what you already know or have heard of. For instance if you type in "teline" it will show you all our 5 templates in the Teline series we have designed to date.
5. Another change is we re-enabled pagination of showcase section. Instead of scrolling through the complete template list with ajax-based loading. This way you can easily navigate to older themes by directly visiting URLs with page parameter ("?page=4").
6. Quick links: Saving you tons of time with direct navigation to places that really matters to visitors.
7. We have inserted tags to each template that helps to better classify concept purpose and category (e.g news, ecommerce).

III. Template Detail

For the detail page we are trying to increase convenience for visitors to learn faster about the template they have chosen to take a look at, including:

8. Template stats: No need to login into the forum to know basic stats like how often users have downloaded current template? Is it popular? How old is the template?
9. Positions: Curious about what position layout looks like?
10. Quicklinks: Smarter placement of quick links to places that matters to visitors directly next to the screenshot is more intuitive and saves you tons of time. Download J1.5 version! How does J1.6 version look like in live?

IV. Miscellaneous

• Updated to run on latest T3 v2.
• Adding J1.6 related links into navigation and pages for more visibility.
• Fixed few minor bugs from old version such as CSS breaks in IE7.
• Now using latest version of sh404SEF.