Learning and exploring
For years, Nikon USA has been producing pretty darn amazing content for the Learn & Explore section of its website—inspirational articles and videos, how-tos and tutorials, gear explanations, photographer profiles and more. Trouble was, no one could find it.
We were asked to rethink the entire section—to make it easier for readers to find content they’re interested in (and to discover content they didn’t know existed), to encourage longer and deeper engagement (more reading for longer periods of time), to present the articles beautifully…in short, to make it a better editorial site.
A single premise led our entire redesign effort: When you’re learning about something, you want to see all of the content a site has to offer on that topic—videos, articles, tutorials, photographer profiles…everything. Yet, editorial sites are often organized by content type—articles in one place, videos in another place, gear reviews in another place, profiles in another place, etc. That forces the reader to make totally unnecessary decisions before they even begin browsing content…”Hmmm…I want to learn about HDR photography, so that’ll probably be in…Articles? Videos?” Booooo.
Instead, we designed the site around topic filtering. Readers simply enter a topic (or select on of our popular suggestions), and the site shows all content related to that topic regardless of what type of content it is. So if you filter by HDR Photography, you’ll see tutorials on the technique, overviews of products that have built-in HDR capability, profiles of photographers who shoot HDR photos, even workshops on shooting HDR photography. And to further support the idea that content type doesn’t matter—only topic and relevance matters—every result is presented the same way: a simple tile with a representative image.
Seemed like a smart solution to us, and the results seem to support our opinion:
• 58% increase in average time spent on site
• 43% increase in article views per visit
• Increase in overall customer satisfaction
• Official Honoree in the Best Practices category of 17th Annual Webby Awards
• Finalist in Best Software Design category of American Business Awards
Here’s an Apple-esque look at the updates