TED
Website Redesign Case Study
User Research
The Problem
TED is a nonpartisan nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks. TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues.
While researching TED, we noticed their marketing efforts to gain more memberships, and we wanted to know why they had not been reached. We wanted to redesign the TED website to be intuitive, modern, and user friendly. An eye catching website where people could expand their knowledge while having fun learning is a must.
The Solution
Our team developed a tailored community based redesign to help shift subscribers of TED on YouTube to TED’s website to experience less ads, more learning, & a more personalized content feed.
This design will be better because the user will be presented with more personalized TED content while feeding ads that are shorter, but more quality to the user.
We’re believable because it will offer what users love about YouTube while discarding what they don't.
Tools Used
Figma, Miro, Unsplash.com, ProCreate, Google Slides
Interview Plan
Perform 1 on 1 interviews with 5 target users to understand how users choose and consume content, and any frustrations that occur while watching that content.
Research Plan
We aim to redesign the TED website to provide a more personalized, community based user experience in order to get users to consume content on the TED website instead of other platforms. We will conduct 15-20 minute user interviews to collect qualitative data. We will take notes and utilize this info to inform how we can improve our trajectory.
CASE STUDY COLLABORATORS Melissa Hermes, Hannah Coronel, DeAjia Hickmon, Morgan Rooks
User Interview Insights
Affinity Diagram
Website Heuristic Evaluation
User Scenario
Through user interviews, survey questions, and heuristic evaluation of the current TED website we were able to identify a few key features that we felt could improve the user experience and give viewers a reason to choose the TED website over other content platforms.
These features were laid out on a prioritization matrix to identify the most potentially impactful features with low complexity for implementation.
Feature Prioritization Matrix
Addressing the Ad Problem
TED offers less ads than competitors while also serving more intelligent & innovative ads that users would actually like to see. But how do we get users to TED?
Making the Switch
At its core, users are more liable to use YouTube over TED because they trust specific creators & their community.
TED lacks the ability for users to subscribe to a creator/speaker or save topics of interest, causing the user to be flooded by topics, become overwhelmed, and still lacking in tailored content for the user.
With our features prioritized and the direction for this redesign defined, the below user persona and scenario were created to illustrate a situation where these new features could be beneficial to a user.
Through our preliminary survey, we realized that most people do not use the TED website to consume TED’s content. Users tend to seek out more familiar platforms to watch these videos.
With this in mind, the objectives for our user interviews would be understanding:
1) How people choose the videos they watch
2) Where people go to watch videos
3) What people value in the content they consume
A user flow was created to show how our user would navigate these new features on the TED website.
User Flow
Wireframe Iterations
Wireframe Sketch
Digital Wireframe
Hi-Fi Wireframe
After gaining feedback from an A/B test between our initial dark mode prototype and a lighter, more colorful prototype, it was decided to proceed with the following lighter, more colorful high fidelity prototype for our final design.
Click screens below to try clickable prototypes for desktop and mobile
Click screen below for a link to the full case study slide deck