Suzanne Collins needs Help: A week-long Design Sprint
I chose to improve Suzanne Collins website to hone my optimization skills. For those of you who don’t know, she is the author of the Hunger Games Trilogy among other books. She is very successful, and as of 2016, had a net worth of $80 million dollars. However, through this project I learned that money isn’t everything! Her website is still horrible but don’t just take my word for it, let’s take a look.
This is her homepage and as you can see, there’s a lot wrong with it. The links are hidden on the side, and some of them don’t work either. There’s way too much text and it’s mostly reviews, which are all over the website. No consistent alignment for text, links, or images.
What I decided to do was to make a design that was engaging, easy-to use, and reflective of her work.
Here were my two designs, A and B. As you can see, they’re quite similar though not identical. Design B is much simpler and there are slight changes in placement, content, and colour.
I set up the Chalkmark test using Optimal Workshop to compare the usability of these designs with the original site and Design B was the winner! I was able to boost the average success rate by 31% and decrease the average time on task by 6.1 seconds. Based on that I think Suzanne Collins should shut up and give me her money!
