Why Aren't Our Users Using Our Navigation?

Survey Analysis

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?

For this project I was tasked with surveying our user community on their acceptance and usage of the Fandom global navigation. Fandom has two types of navigation, local (which navigates within a specific wiki) and global (which can navigate across all Fandom wikis). 

What do we think we know?

The intention for this form of navigation was to get users interested in other fandoms within the site. 

Findings

How do I find out?

I surveyed six thousand users across multiple usage levels who use Fandom. I asked them about various aspects of the global navigation to get a detailed understanding of how and when they use it.

What did I actually find?

Users don’t tend to use this form of navigation to traverse the site. Most find that it doesn’t provide the utility that even a simple Google search can accomplish for them. They would be open to personalized recommendations for fandoms to visit as well as a place to save the fandoms they already frequent. But as it currently stands the global nav seems out of place on most fandoms who have curated their look to match their IP.

Impact

How did I impact the company?

This lead to conversations about how we generate revenue at Fandom and potentially moving from an ad impression per page to multiple impressions per page to meet users at how they want to interact with our site

What did I take away from this?

We tried to force the users to interact with the site on our terms before looking at how they interact with the site. If I were to redo this entire feature I would start with how the users want to traverse the site.