Posted by : Nandini Nayak, Director, HP.com Site Design & Research

I am glad to see some talk on the blog circuit regarding HP’s new US Home page which went into full production earlier this month. There are those who critique us from a visual perspective and attempt to “date” us as if this was about a fashion trend, others give us more credit for trying something new. As usability practitioners, we cannot design by random opinion, we have to let the data speak for itself. Ultimately, it is about whether our users can find the information they seek as efficiently as possible and whether we can communicate to our users what we have to offer in a useful, useable and engaging way.

Our data tells us that we have made significant progress from where we started.

We went through substantial amounts of validation research. We conducted several rounds of in- lab and remote usability testing, eye movement studies and rating scales. We put all this data together to guide our design. We finally put the design through a limited in-production test that I mentioned in a previous blog post. What you see is a result of this work.

Most users gave us very positive reactions to the visual design and scale values were significantly better for the new page. Some were surprised by the change, but we all know change is always surprising, even disconcerting perhaps. But your best usability “gurus” will tell you that as long as you have created a model that keeps the information scent strong, the design will succeed. Every user we tested was able to get to the information they needed using the task oriented navigation, using the segment oriented navigation or using search. On some tasks we made substantial progress in directing customers to appropriate locations.

So what’s really different?

We actively sought to promote content that we knew, through our analytics, was important to users in a task-oriented way (Shop for..; Support & Drivers and a new category of content that we introduced called ‘Explore and Create'..) We continue to have the segment based navigation as an alternate navigation path.

We use some new techniques to reveal content. Users don’t always have to click to see new content, content comes to the user as they explore different links. It is a responsive interface avoiding some of the pogo sticking that occurs when users inadvertently click on links. We have used this feature to reveal not just textual menus but rich imagery that goes with the topic.

We know there are popular notions that tell us that home pages should be a full link list index page of the site. We needed to create a balance, providing broad views of the content with one that actually engages rather than overwhelms users. We have moved away from a link heavy presentation to one that reveals content in chunks as the user explores the different options. Our design creates a balance between being information rich and engaging at the same time.

We have also moved away from “thumbnail” style imagery that some sites apparently favor to images that actually reveal detail . We have found that user engagement with these images is substantially improved.  And we have brought a connection between the different media messages we communicate to our different audiences with the stylistic features of our imagery and headlines on the home page.

We believe our users are pleased with the outcome and you will see us continue to improve and refine both the home page and the rest of the site.