BibleProject Guides & Collections

I began to solve these problems with understanding the target audience and their core job that needed to be done. Through years of user interviews and surveys, I learned our audience used our content for personal study in order to grow in their knowledge, and to apply that knowledge to teach others. I also learned that many of them didn't know the breadth of content we had on particular topics, and would mostly use one piece of content per visit. In user interviews, I learned they would come back more often if they had known about our related content.

Using Google analytics, HotJar, Heap, I could see that we were getting a decent amount of organic traffic, but the users were only interacting with about one piece of content per visit, and were not converting into returning users.

I also completed a search analysis to see what questions and topics people were looking for on our site. This gave us insight into what the audience was asking and where the gaps in our content were.

When dealing with a large amount of loosely-related content, information architecture becomes a huge undertaking. I did an analysis of the entire library of content, categorizing and tagging each video, podcast, article, class, reading plan, and more to see how it was all connected.

Working from the understanding of the what job the user needs to be done, I documented the ideal user journey to help new and existing audience members get the answers they are looking for, as well as see the breadth of related content we had.

Guides are what we called this first-iteration of the project, basically an SEO-friendly guide to a topic with related content mixed in. The goal of this part of the project, was to test if we could focus on a topic, capture the organic search traffic, and see if those users will interact with related content.

With a pillar-style page as our inspiration, I quickly built some prototypes for usability testing. After deciding on a particular layout, I created three Guide pages on the topics of Advent, the Book of Job, and Love. We decided to start with these topics based on it being the Advent season, along with what our search data showed would be effective.

We built and tested the three SEO-friendly pages, discovering that with targeted article content we were able to capture new organic traffic, with a higher-than average time on page, while interacting with 32% more content. We were excited to get such positive results and the team decided to build out these pages for each book of the Bible.

While this was a success in many ways, and even our returning audience loved the new pages, we were getting feedback that the information hierarchy was confusing and related content hard to find. I was anticipating this and was already working on the the second phase – collections.

With the success of guides, the next problem I focused on was making the content more organized and discoverable for returning users.

Leaning on the research and analysis I had previously done, I ideated through a number of concepts and prototypes, did some usability testing with the BibleProject design audience, and designed what turned out to be a mini-site with the Guide as the landing page, and all topically related content easily discoverable. We were also able to maintain related content in the guide itself through a new icon-driven design pattern. This new structure allowed for an ever-growing amount of related content, but with an intentional information architecture, capturing new organic traffic while serving returning users..