Redesigning BugBuster.com
“I looked at your site but I’m still not exactly sure what you do.”
Unfortunately, we were hearing this sort of comment far too often from our users. Our site wasn’t doing a very good job of explaining what we do here at BugBuster.
We decided to fix it.
Over the past few weeks, we have been working on a complete redesign of bugbuster.com. Our goal was to make it clearer what BugBuster is and what we have to offer.
What is BugBuster?
First, we had to answer this ourselves in the simplest way possible. Trying to tell someone that we are a “cloud-based end-to-end functional testing and site monitoring solution for web applications and ecommerce sites” is a tough pill to swallow. We needed to break it down into simpler terms.
- Build tests.
- Manage test plans.
- Monitor live sites.
These three core functionalities cover most everything we do here at BugBuster. They became the basis for the content of the new site.
Crafting a story
We made the “build — manage — monitor” mantra basis of the new story of BugBuster. Our goal here at BugBuster is to make web testing accessible for everyone, so we cut back on the amount of technical jargon we used to keep the message clear for everyone.
Lightening the tone of the content also helped to improve the readability of our site. We used a tool called Hemingway to improve the readability of our site by reducing the clutter in our messaging. As an example, our previous homepage read at an 11th Grade level and our new homepage reads at a 7th Grade level. Hemingway was an invaluable tool for improving our content.
Watching the numbers
Before starting on the visual design, we went back and looked at our analytics to see what we could learn from our previous site. We saw that certain pages had unusually high bounce rates, the highest being the Pricing page. A high bounce rate can mean lots of things, but this information helped us to decide where to spend the most time improving the site.
We also looked at our browser statistics to determine what kind of browsers we needed to support for our redesign. Here is the breakdown of our user’s browser usage for Jan 2015:
- Chrome — 73.26%
- Firefox — 13.13%
- Safari — 6.86%
- IE 11–2.69%
- IE 9–0.74%
- IE 10–0.68%
- IE 8–0.68%
We decided we would support all current browsers minus one version. Despite this, we did make a small effort to make the site at least render in IE9.
And the new site is fully responsive, despite the fact that mobile + tablet traffic only made up ~5% of our total traffic last month.
Designing a better experience
Finally, we had to create an experience fitting of the new content. We took a cleaner, more minimalist approach to the design than before. Our old site had content hidden in carousels and tabbed menus that was almost never seen by users.
The new site tells a simpler story of BugBuster. We reduced the amount of content a user sees at any given time. The content is easier to understand and by telling a shorter but clearer story with fewer pages, we hope to reduce the confusion felt by our users about what exactly we have to offer.
We will write a follow up to our redesign in a few weeks and provide some insight into how our users responded both based on analytics and user feedback.
Shoot us a tweet and let us know what you think about our new design.
Originally published at blog.bugbuster.com.
