I did it. Redesign and radical simplification of http://ondesire.com has been implemented. There’s more to come but the major scaffolding is in place.
Here’s the landing page. Pretty sparse eh? The idea is push some of the complexity deeper into the blog by establishing a traditional branching structure and with limit overwhelm. There are basically three points of entry… “Our collective destiny – Desire”, “Blog” and “Movies”.
This page needs a stronger visible presence and I plan to stick at least three movie windows between the current image and the sidebar.
“Our collective destiny – Desire” is an introduction to the main theme – that our desire determines everything, the choices we make. It connects desire to our present situation. It also implies that desire can be designed. The copy doesn’t yet make the connection between desire and survival, that our other desires are all piled onto survival – so it needs some work. At the very bottom of this page is a site map, “Navigating On Desire” which provides a structured view on the mad cacophony of posts. Let’s skip that for now and look at blog and movies.
The blog has two views, by year “Latest news” and by month. An alternate view is the “expedition map”, which structures the posts with geography rather than time. The site map might also be appropriate to provide another post sorting modality for a total of three – time, place and relevance.
Digression – This data viewport idea flows from my CHI design days with Fred Oefline and Tamarack Software in the 90s.
Based on Google Analytics, “Our collective Destiny – Desire” and “Movies” were the most popular choices on the previous landing page design. I suspected that visitors were clicking “Our collective Destiny – Desire” out of confusion rather than interest. The new landing page design should offer insight. “Movies” will likely be the most selected now. This “Movies” page is clunky and would greatly benefit from thumbnails and a reordering of titles to put the most recent first.
Here’s the structured design for navigating On Desire’s content. There’s still quite a bit to do, but it should be enough to assess visitor interaction.
Yesterday – while all these changes were being implemented – the bounce rate for the landing page jumped up from 20 – 45%. I’ll give it a say or two to settle and then check again.