Back to Business
Responsive Site. Done. Now Let’s Start The Real Work.
Now we’ve laid the foundations with our responsive site, it’s back to business as usual.
I’m Catriona. I’m a Product Manager at Imperial War Museums (IWM). I’m part of a small team that look after iwm.org.uk. We only have one developer, one designer and one big website. Well, that’s a lie, we also have a bunch of other sites. But let’s not get into that now.
The point is, we have one big website split into four products: Data and Assets, Visit, Inspire and Research. We’ll do a more detailed post about our products soon but for now we want to share the work we do on a regular basis.
This is the first post about our bi-weekly releases and the work we’ve done in the sprint.
1. Menu links are now entirely clickable
During our user testing day we saw people struggling to click the menu. They wanted to click in the white space between the word and the highlight. Users, we heard you! Go forth and click the white space.
2. Masonry blocks are now entirely clickable and load correctly
As Jesse mentioned in his post about our user testing day we’ve fixed this. Enough said.
3. The Facebook button was linking to AddThis
Oops! That wasn’t meant to happen. The Facebook share buttons now let users share the page without linking them to the AddThis homepage.
4. Tables were all sorts of confused
Taglines were flowing in to the wrong columns on smaller screens and confusing users. We’ve now put them in their place.
5. Learning resources were lost
We noticed that our learning resources looked a little lost. The pink highlight which shows users where they are in the site wasn’t displaying. But they’ve found their parent page now. Hurrah!
6. We’ve added an optional image to event pages
A priority at the moment is to sell IWM Duxford air show tickets for September’s event. We want to find out if an image on the page increases the conversion rate to the ticket buying site. More detail to follow when we have some data.
7. We’ve added optional visitor info to event pages
Air shows have different visitor information to a general day out at IWM Duxford so we’ve created an optional visitor information block for the event page. We can use this to give users the important information about getting to air shows.
We’ll need to test and measure this — will we receive fewer queries about how to get to an air show? Will the visitor information increase the conversion rate to the ticket buying site? Data to follow.
8. Fixed a bunch of display issues on history articles
We worked hard to prioritise the Minimal Viable Product for the launch of the responsive site, and these pesky bugs, although slightly ugly, didn’t prevent the launch. Instead we fixed them in this sprint.
Our related content now sticks to the correct content area, the spacing around the H tags is now smaller, videos fill the player frame and there is no longer an odd blue outline to the video player.
9. Exhibitions titles were being pulled from the wrong place
Not any more! Exhibitions are now showing off their full titles.
10. Getting back to the top should be easier
We noticed users struggling to get back to the top of their screens on mobiles and tablets. We already have a ‘back to top’ button but users weren’t seeing it. We’ve shortened the time it takes for the button to appear and we’ll be eagerly watching video testing to see if users see it and use it.
