My first practical assignment on User Experience :-)

I am very excited to share updates about my first project assignment on UX, that I have been working for last 1.5 month. It is a platform for me to apply my usability concepts and knowledge that I have gained so far from online UX tutorials, blogs, Technical forums etc.

I am working on a Ruby and Rails tutorial with my friends in India (Abhishek Nalwaya and Akshat Paul). Our objective is to improve the overall experience of this site. The initial versions of this tutorial were deployed in Heroku with the sole intention of learning some new technologies. But now, we want to completely focus on re-designing this site for improving the usage. It is a small effort from our side to contribute to the ROR community.

So we started with analyzing the site usage results in Google Analytics Dashboard, where we observed a very high bounce rate. Moreover, the Google pagerank and visual appeal of the tutorial was not very good, which definitely implied that there is a huge scope of improvement.



We came up with these initial thoughts to start our work :-

Improve the whole information architecture by revising the content with the latest version material, as that is the main deciding factor to retain visitors on any tutorial. Also, adding two sitemap's i.e. one for site visitors and the other for googlebot would be helpful to provide an organized view of the site to its visitors.
Navigation mechanism can be structured better by shifting the navigation links to the top , so that we have more space on the content page. The social media icons and twitter feeds are not prominent currently and they can made more visible.

We pushed our first release on 18 Dec with following improvement stories:-

1. XML sitemap implemented and registered in Google Webmaster Tools to improve the content accessibility to the crawler.



2. Favicon added to have a unique brand image to the tutorial.



3. Revision of the About Us page with pictures to make the developers more approachable for suggestions and feedback's.



We are currently working on the content revision and application of search optimization techniques. I would keep you guys updated about my learning experience with this system. In case you have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to me.