Atlas Obscura is a popular online platform that invites users to discover and explore unique, hidden, and often bizarre locations and experiences around the world. The website provides an extensive database of off-the-beaten-path destinations, curated by a passionate community of explorers and travelers.
Solo Product Designer
Strategy
Branding
Graphic Design
UX & UI
Professional
The previous Atlas Obscura homepage design had become outdated and cluttered, failing to effectively showcase the platform's unique content and experiences. The challenge was to redesign the homepage to create a more engaging, immersive, and user-friendly experience that would better reflect the brand's essence and capture the spirit of discovery.
The primary goal of the project was to develop a clean, modern, and visually appealing homepage design that would enhance user experience and increase engagement, improve content discoverability and navigation, and strengthen brand identity and showcase the platform's unique value proposition.
Based on past and most recent interviews, it appears that discoverability is one of our biggest challenges: 'I didn’t know about Classes, Podcasts, etc...
We needed to explore how we could more seamlessly integrate our many products in a delightful way, while bringing the design and technical foundation to a state that allows for further optimization over time.
Atlas Obscura wants to be presented as a leading edge media company with clear product offerings, strong brand positioning, and high value for potential partners and community members.
Feedback from users helped us confirm that scannability, readability, and discoverability were major issues in the current design. At first glance (see old page below), most of these issues could be resolved by following clear UX laws such as Miller’s Law, the Aesthetic Usability Effect, the Von Restorff Effect, Jakob’s Law, etc. Essentially, scannability can be improved by clearly grouping content, simplifying copy, and leveraging existing mental models. But first, it's time to revise the core components from the past.
The homepage redesign project is a stepping stone for the larger re-architecture project planned at Atlas Obscura. As the entire site is set to be refactored, we examined the existing core components and style guide to kick-start a refreshed and more modern UI kit (see a snapshot below). The challenge lies in the fact that the new system will coexist with legacy pages and needs to be novel, more granular, and more flexible, all without creating a 'Frankenstein' site.
Business Objectives: Atlas Obscura seeks to present itself as a leading-edge media company, not exclusively as a travel company. To address this strategic shift, I revised product placement, the use of card components, and the user journey into our content.
One Page to Rule Them All: Our objectives included increasing membership, newsletter sign-ups, account creation, and ad impressions, while organizing content clearly, presenting our value proposition, and supporting brand partnerships and investors. All of these factors had to be taken into consideration while designing a delightful experience.
Above the Fold: This section received considerable attention from our stakeholders and the VP of Product. The constraint was to present the user with an overview of our extensive product offering in the first 900px, while also appearing as a media company. I had to commit to this constraint to launch as quickly as possible. However, my initial position was to reduce cognitive overload and create an experience that would encourage users to keep scrolling and discover more down the page.
Community: Our user advocates helped us moving forward with reviving the sense of community and highlight user contributions across the page, which were well received by our users.
Both internal feedback and qualitative user feedback were extremely positive. However, due to reprioritization, we haven't yet had the chance to evaluate the success of the release with a larger pool of users and assess potential accessibility/UX issues.
Initial data review indicated that we were able to improve standard KPIs such as Bounce Rate, Average Session Duration, Sessions, Pageviews, and Pages / Sessions
By reducing the real estate of the search feature, we learned that we ultimately reduced users' access to it. As of today, we have not identified any impact on our overall traffic or received any negative qualitative feedback. I am advocating for continued research and testing of our media persona, as well as our traveler and explorer personas.