Intuit QuickBase Blog
Context
“The Fast Track” is an industry leading blog offering advice for small to medium size businesses. The pain we were aiming to solve was to a) expose more content up front so the user did not have to dig down more than one level to find a piece of interest b) give it a more modern look and feel, and c) design it in such a way that a new blog “The QuickBase Blog” could use the same template.
Activities
Content notes and information architecture
From the jump, we had responsive design as a focus. The current design was not responsive and more and more traffic was coming from mobile. I conducted a collaborative whiteboard session to understand the content and how we might go about blocking it on the homepage.
We then had another session where we progressively blocked the content through a category page and then to the article itself.
Wireframing and Prototyping
The white boarding session provided guidance for how to display content from the homepage, through a category page and then to the article itself.
What took more time was thinking through the nuances of how to display the main categories on the homepage because we need to show the category title, number of articles within that category, and we wanted a way for the user to browse articles quickly without leaving the homepage.
Visual design
I was also responsible for the visual design. The comp phase was relatively straightforward as we had a strong foundation in the wireframes and prototype. Much of the actual imagery was going to be served dynamically so it was a matter of specifying fonts and guidelines on imagery.
Results
In the six months following launch, overall blog visits grew by 12%, average views per post grew by 15%, and email subscribers grew by 10%.
Before
After
Takeaways
This is the first and only blog I have ever worked on. For me it was a learning experience in terms of working on the marketing side of the business. I have always been focused on working on systems that it was refreshing to learn more about what drives traffic to a site.