When is a quiz an ad?

Usability Testing

Foundation

Who is this for?

Fandom is a wiki hosting platform for all topics related to Gaming, TV, and Movies

What are we looking for?

Fandom had recently created a new quiz feature for users to test their knowledge on their favorite fandoms while they were looking for information. It was believed that this would get users more engaged with the platform in an effort to show them more ads. Unfortunately, quizzes had a very low click through rate and I was tasked with finding out why.

What do we think we know?

We believed that the placement of the Quiz was causing the low click through rate and that different places on the page or more distinctive design would help direct users toward it.

Findings

How do I find out?

For this project I relied on a usability study to determine why people weren’t engaging with the feature. 

What did I actually find?

Since Fandom has a lot of ads on the platform, users believe that anything sufficiently different from the page is an ad. This hurt the usage of quizzes because people were not clicking on them for fear they would be brought to another page and lose their place where they were reading. This combined with the fact most users were here to read about their fandoms, not participate in games, led to the low click through rate.

Impact

How did I impact the product?

Focusing on making the quizzes appear more like the Fandom wiki site, combined with making the quizzes as close to the subject matter of the page ensure that users were more likely to associate the quiz with Fandom rather than an ad. This has allowed an increase of clickthroughs for the feature.

What did I take away from this?

When most things are ads, everything is an ad. By trying to monetize the site we unintentionally conditioned our users to ignore everything that wasn’t directly related to the page. While we need to monetize our product, doing it so heavily impacted the usability of the site.