Usability Revisions Boost Conversion Rate by 16 Percent

Learning Care Group is the second-largest child care provider in North America and manages multiple brands and web properties. LCG has partnered with the team at Pure Visibility since 2006.

The Problem

As part of an ongoing effort to improve usability, improve findability, and increase conversion rates, the project shifted gears from traditional SEO and paid search work to review the user experience of the website. If web site visitors aren’t sure what to do next, then conversion rates can suffer as confusion takes the place of action.

The Method

Among the available user experience methodologies and tools, we chose remote moderated usability testing as the best fit for the project needs and goals. Having real people interact with the site reveals qualitative data not seen in traditional web analytics. Why were people choosing certain pages to view and what were they looking at and looking for on those pages?

Participants were recruited among first-time visitors on one of the brand sites, using a short screening process. We followed up via phone within minutes to try to set up the usability session. Each session was done with screensharing software and the telephone, to follow participants as they interacted with the site and glean their expectations, goals, and reactions during the session.

We began each session with an unscripted portion, where users explored the site as they naturally would, while we asked questions along the way to better understand why they made the choices they did on the site. Later during the session we asked them to perform specific, common tasks such as trying to find a school near them.

The Results

We discovered that people saw the call to action, “Find a School,” yet scrolled right past it, since it was located in the upper right corner of every page; where participants perceived there was no immediately useful content. This, in fact, is the major call to action that LCG wanted people to do above all else, and many people were missing the opportunity to do so, because they could no longer see it.

Several changes were proposed to improve the visibility of the Find a School function, including making it a permanent part of the primary site navigation, but using a contrasting color. We also included it prominently at the bottom of most pages, where people finish reading. Other minor user experience improvements were done as a result of the usability findings, such as including new information that participants had searched for but hadn’t found because it didn’t exist on the site.

After implementing the proposed changes to improve the visibility of the Find a School function, conversion rates increased by 16 percent. These simple changes have meant over 16,000 additional leads per month, across all Learning Care Group brands.