Slant Home
Most people discovered Slant by landing on a single question page from search. If they were interested, they'd head to the home page to learn more, and too often left confused about what Slant actually was.
I led a redesign to fix that first impression.
Goal
One of the problems with the Slant home page was the lack of communication on what Slant really was. Much of the traffic coming in would land on one of our question pages, and if the person was interested, they'd visit our home page to learn more.
We wanted to create a better experience when a user visited, and give a better overview of what was really going on. Every time we start a project, we look toward a stat we can track to know whether we were successful. For this one, we looked at new-user conversion.
Process
Part of the problem with Slant is how different it is from other sites. So for the home page we wanted to keep the layout similar to what other sites do, to make the information easier to digest.
The old home page landed you on a feed where you could immediately jump in and interact with the community. But we had a high bounce rate from users coming off a question page. Our research showed they were now interested in learning more about Slant, but weren't getting it because we'd dropped them in the middle of the action.
The tag selector
A fun, interactive element we developed was the tag selector. Through it, new community members could customize their home-page feed, which we proved effective via a custom experiment delivered through email.
Results
All of our actions at Slant were driven by data, so we always tracked how users interacted over time. The redesign drove an 89% increase in new accounts created, and on top of that, a noticeable increase in community retention after sign-up.