Nielsen Media Portal
Website redesign
Overview
Nielsen Media Portal is a data delivery website, that serves customers like Disney, Amazon, and NBC Network. Representatives from these companies log in to the Nielsen website daily, to review ratings and analyze data from data sets in the form of downloadable documents.
The current website presented multiple user roadblocks and needed a reevaluation, specifically its information architecture organizational structure, and usability metrics.
My role and impact
As a Senior product designer, I worked on synthesizing user research into insights and created five high-fidelity prototypes that were included in the user testing sessions. Each new prototype success score was measured and compared against the current offering. On a scale of 0 to 10, the current offering was ranked at 3, and our proposed prototype was at 8.
I was responsible for presenting our findings to our stakeholders at Nielsen weekly and getting the buy-in.
Team
Five teammates
Duration
6 Months (2021)
Software
Figma, Zoom
The problem
Product goals, challenges and vision
Our goal was to redesign a user-validated Nielsen Media portal that is useful and usable to users across the globe. We also wanted to quantify how much the proposed designs improve upon the current Nielsen offering, as well as potential competitor products.
The challenges we faced were: high volume of information, the main navigation was confusing and there was no easy way to find files of data, there were redundant features and labeling.
From that, our vision was to understand the users, their workflow, their goals, and their pain points. To simplify the existing Nielsen Answers IA and enable quicker access to Nielsen content while defining a holistic and seamless experience.
User problem
After five rounds of user interviews that were conducted with customers on the current website, and with the new proposed solution/prototype, our research showed:
1) Admins and customers, both user groups need a streamlined navigation and a clearer information architecture.
2) Admins need a better way to upload documents
3) Customers need a functional and simplified home page, and an easy way to find documents and share documents.
Current website
Main navigation is unintuitive
As an example of unintuitive navigation, we can see how the number of tabs in the Main navigation changes once the user selects the Delivery tab and the My Content tab. This is an example where the cognitive and interaction load are high, and how user engagement drops significantly.
User testing
First round of testing showed improved interaction load
In the first round of user testing, we conducted five moderated interviews with Nielsen’s direct customers. On the current website where we asked open-ended questions about how users perform their jobs, what parts of the website they are more likely to use, and how effective is the website in serving their goals. We also measured the task success score and compared that to the new and proposed Prototype 1.
At the end of the hour, we asked if they would recommend both websites to a friend. The current offering was ranked at 3, and our proposed prototype was at 8.
We continued with this type of testing for the next four rounds and we consistently improved the user experience, the task success score, and the net promoter score.
Current website
Prototype 1
Final designs
Main navigation was simplified for ease of use
The first and most important problem we concentrated on was redefining the information architecture and creating an updated site map utilizing a card-sorting technique. This effort resulted in a simple but effective main navigation comprised of Home, Data Libraries, Resources, Notifications, Search, and Profile.
With that, we cleaned up page clutter and improved the usability metrics of the interface almost immediately. We saw and measured improvement in the second user testing round.
Home page – user research showed that ‘My products’ needed customizability
During user interviews, we learned that 90% of users come to Nielsen Media Portal to use My Products. My products are data processing tools that. Therefore, I placed the ‘My Products’ widget in the top left corner to promote discoverability. But, since Nielsen has more than 150 products, users were pretty vocal about the fact that they only come to the Portal to work with 3 to 5 most used products from their company subscription list. Following that insight, I designed the ‘My Products’ widget to be customizable, so users can reorder their most used products based on their preferences.
Home page – we added a new sharing feature to the ‘My Activity’ widget
‘My Activity’ is a new proposed widget for Nielsen’s website. 88% of users come to the website to download, share, and view previously used documents. Their day-to-day workflows require quick access to Nielsen’s data for presentations, analysis, and compilation for future work.
Resources page was recreated to include filters for quick document search
Resources is a page where customers and Nielsen admins, can search and filter for documents that have been uploaded through the portal over the years. We added the ability for the users to share documents within their teams and company-wide with permissions. They can also star the most important documents that will then appear on the home page ‘My Activity’ section.
Data Libraries page was redesigned with a different set of filters
The Data Libraries page is a collection of all files that are related to data analysis. Here we created date-range filters, and this decision was based on how users thought of these data sets when searching. We also added the ability to cross-reference Local and National libraries and filter them by the time when they were created.
Admins page was streamlined to make adding new documents findable in the Recourses page
Nielsen admins can log in to the website and directly upload the documents requested by their clients through the Admin tab. On the Admin page, they can choose file type, content category, subcategory, and suggested keywords before they publish the document. They also have the option to add a keyword from a suggestion list or create a new keyword for easier searching.