Why Can't Our Users Find Our Widgets?

a/b 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?

Based on findings from the Fandom Quizzes study, we learned that users tend to perceive our widgets as ads. Fandom already has negative perception from the community as having too many ads. So how do we provide useful functionality that will not make the users think we are just pushing more ads on them?

What do we think we know?

The designers we worked with mocked up new versions of the widgets we wanted to implement and they needed to see if these versions addressed the concerns of not only the ad blindness, but general blindness toward functionality not about the main content in the wiki articles, which is Fandom’s primary product.

Findings

How do we find out?

For this project, my coworker Elizabeth Shea wrote and fielded a survey in which the users were given a randomized video containing one of four options of videos. Our site with ads and the old version of the widgets, without ads and the old version of the widgets, as well as with ads and the new widget designs, and finally without ads and the new widget designs. This way we could compare both the old and new designs and how ad load affects both of them. I was entrusted with analyzing the data from the survey and sharing the findings with our stakeholders.

What did I actually find?

Since Fandom is comprised of various communities of wiki editors who curate a wiki of their preferred subject, there is usually a stark difference between Fandom’s branding and the wiki’s stylization. We saw that since the widgets were Fandom branded, and not stylized like the wiki they appeared on, that users were more likely to consider them an ad. Unfortunately the proposed new designs of the widgets performed worse in this aspect than the old versions of the widgets.

Impact

How did I impact the product?

The widgets are going through a new round of design to limit the amount they appear as ads to users. We are also discussing incorporating the individual wiki styles into the widgets to make them appear more natural in the wikis they appear in.

What did I take away from this?

Sometimes in order to make a better product, you need to step back and allow the community you built to do their thing. By forcing Fandom branding into everything to spread our brand recognition, we inadvertently are taking away from what users come to us for, the wiki articles we host. Our general users don’t care if they are on our site, Reddit, or Wikipedia, so long as they can get the answers they need. Sometimes we should take a step back and let them.