WANT TO GAIN USERS? EXPLAIN THINGS & SIMPLIFY
We helped Virgin Unite come up with an improved information architecture and alternate look and feel for it's collaboration with Virgin Mobile: Free I.P.
Free I.P. is a volunteer platform created by Virgin Mobile USA. The initiative gives concert fans the chance to receive premium tickets in exchange for volunteer hours at local homeless youth organizations across the country. This past summer, the “FREE.I.P” program at Virgin Mobile's FreeFest generated more than 30,000 hours of community service by concert-goers. The event also raised $80,000 in donations and collected over 7000 in-kind donations to help homeless youth.
Marc - Website & Communications Manager at Virgin Unite - needed to come up with an alternative information architecture and improved look and feel for the Free I.P. site. He needed something that felt essentially Virgin, appealed to the target audience and simplified the user experience encouraging more users to follow through with signing up.
Like many website designs, crucially missing from the original homepage design was a clear explanation of what the project was, what steps users needed to take to get involved, and how the project could reduce user anxiety if by making it clear what support would be there for them once they did get involved. To solve this, we added simple direct explanation to the top of the page, listed the steps in big clear chunks, and made it easy to see who else was doing it too.
To improve the sign up rate we reduced complexity and user 'paralysis through over-choice' by moving all but three buttons to below the fold in the page, making the next step much clearer. Just for the homepage, we moved the main menu down the page as a 'More Questions' panel so that users could still explore other pages if they wanted to, but it was no longer adding to the sign up problem.
Complete with dynamic event profile feature showing the gigs available to users, and the increase in visibility of the social features, we gave Marc an information architecture focused on user signup, and a simple, cool and de-cluttered design that he was looking forward to bring back to his US team. It was a super fast turnaround for the work. Intense - but we had fun.
If we can help you explain things and simplify your site - get in touch.