Corus Entertainment: HGTV Canada
The HGTV Canada Redesign
Role: Product Designer
Overview:
In 2020, in a rush of the moment, the HGTV Canada website needed a redesign. Due to limits with time, budget and scope it was quickly placed into an existing templated used for the Slice Canada website.
In March 2023, I began to suggest we reassess HGTV’s design choices. Since they’d been made in the spur of the moment, we’d never gotten the opportunity to research or make informed decisions on our changes. From January of 2023 to May of 2023, due to mass layoffs, and shifting budget initiatives, our team lost a fair amount of talent.
I continued forward with the project, being mindful of shifting budgets, and resources.
HGTV logo
Phase 1: Understanding Users and Stakeholders
This project began with limitations. Our team no longer had a designated UX researcher, and we had three fewer developers. We were also limited with changes, given that a rebrand is being launched in the US this summer. With a small team, and reduced person-power I adjusted the UX process to taper the roll-out of the new features.
I began with a stakeholder interview. These included questions sent to content writers for HGTV, the Content Manager, the Director of Lifestyle and the Project Manager for Lifestyle. In this survey I aimed to understand their primary issues with the site, what they think is missing, the issue they’re having with the site, what they’ve observed from users, and improvements they would like to see.
Then, we did a Hotjar User Interview. We began gathering data, and painpoitns from our users. To accomplish this task, we used hotjar and added a short user survey to the site. In this survey we collected demographic information of the users, as well as data related to their current experience with HGTV.
Based on the research we collected from users and stakeholders, we were able to initiate a few crucial pain points to begin working on. I collected some information and some commonalities among their pain points to start making small adjustments to the site that could begin to quell these issues.
Phase 3: Putting together the Findings and Beginning a User Flow
Once we collected all the data from the stakeholders and users, we were able to find some common pain points to begin working with.
The site was difficult to navigate
The current layout of the site and navigation does not help people get where they wanted to. Based on our research it was determined that users are primarily looking for DIY and Design Content, however, we did not serve them this information anywhere, or lead them to this content.
This also meant a reimagining of how content on the site is organized. In order to properly provide the appropriate content to users, we’d need to reimagine the tagging and category system on the site.
2. There is a high bounce rate
The majority of our traffic came from Google. However, once people would land on a page, we would direct them to the the information they wanted, and let them bounce. There was nothing to keep people on the site.
3. The Primary Pages that users were landing on: Notably, pages related to shows, article pages, and pages related to hosts were not giving users all the information related to the content they were searching for.
Phase 3: Beginning the User Flow
With the information gathered from these interviews, I started to create mocks and prototypes of possible changes we would initiate in the preliminary part of the redesign.
Firstly: I began making changes to the navigation to include the content that the users are searching for.
Secondly: I redesigned the current filtering system on the site, to allow users to find the information they’re looking for in a more granular fashion once they landed on a category page. For example, the DIY page had filters related to room, budget, date, etc.
Thirdly: Made updates to the show pages, article pages and host pages to incorporate, articles, data, show information and videos on this page to offer users more value on a single page, than only information about the show.
Conclusion:
At the time of my departure, this was as much as I was able to complete in the project.
Due to confidentiality, I am unable to show all the user flow, data and charts that have been built, but I am able to show more of my presentation upon request.