Project Background

• NASCAR needed a new homepage website strategy to drive fan engagement and reduce bounce rates. The new design aims to prioritize the content that fans care about the most. The main issue with the current website design is that it does not prioritize the content that is most popular among fans, which is Drivers content.

UX Research Insights

• Drivers are the most popular content pages reported in Adobe Analytics.
  
• To discover Drivers content, the most popular page, users must spend more time finding links positioned towards the bottom of the site’s menus.
• Major sports leagues prioritize player and team content while featuring them prominently in their site top-banners.
• NASCAR fan support for their favorite Drivers continues to be both the leading form of engagement on social media and the contributor to brand loyalty.
• The existing website design features a three column layout with varying container sizes. This can disrupt the user's understanding of the importance and relationship between different pieces of information.
• The inconsistent design and lack of visual hierarchy make it difficult for users to navigate the homepage and find the information they need.

Our Work

• A sitemap was created to understand the full scope of the website's content and how it was organized.
• The sitemap also showed common elements that appeared on multiple pages, which helped determine the most important content and how to improve the design for a natural flow between pages.
• An object map was created to identify which objects in the system should be linked to each other to improve navigation.
• The object map was used to reimagine the information hierarchy of the navigation.

Job to be Done

• Help fans discover information about their favorite NASCAR drivers with ease.

Functional Criteria

• Find your favorite driver content in a few clicks.

Emotional Criteria (Personal)

• Further relationship and loyalty to favorite drivers.

Emotional Criteria (Social)

• Able to share fandom of specific drivers with network.

New UX Design Features

• New navigation including most popular pages.
• Filter top driver row by cup.
• Drivers row featuring Top Drivers by cup.
• Favorite drivers you care about the most and pin them in the row.
• Consistent button styling.
• Rotating stories with loading interaction to drive engagement in more site content.
• Featured Drivers row card associated with Driver featured in stories.
• Driver square card associated with driver featured in video.
• New Must Watch container sizing to highlight top video content.
• Prominent Seasonal Shop Promo.
• New navigation and page hierarchy influenced by site object mapping exercise.

Conclusion

• The new design aims to provide a more engaging website that captures fan attention with the content they care most about. With the new navigation and page hierarchy influenced by the site object mapping exercise and the new design features, the website will be able to help fans discover information about their favorite NASCAR drivers with ease. The website will be able to meet the functional and emotional criteria of the users and will help drive fan engagement and reduce bounce rates.

Sitemap

Object Map

Prototype