Penguin.co.uk
UX / PRODUCT DESIGN LEAD
2019
Being one the largest book publishers of the World, Penguin Random House has nearly 250 imprints and publishing houses under its roof. With 35138 books, 16171 authors and 1518 articles its website caters a vast amount of content and it was long do for a redesign.
Goals
The purpose of penguin.co.uk is underpinned by three core objectives:
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Drive purchase: Getting people to a book page of a title they’re likely to buy as quickly and easily as possible
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Drive discovery: Promoting expertise and quality by making penguin.co.uk a destination where readers come to be inspired to read
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Celebrate: Telling an inspiring and cohesive story about our brands, authors and books
Challenges
​​When I was brought into this project, it had been on hold for almost over a year. The initial designs that were put together by an agency were outdated and they were based solely on business goals with a lack of usability research and validation.
The biggest challenge was to resolve the disjointed user journey. This was mainly due to the navigation being dictated by the complex structure of the business rather than the logical taxonomy of the products it offers. Penguin Random House takes pride in the distinctiveness of the publishing houses under its roof which influenced the structure of the old website. To suggest a different approach I needed to support my case with solid facts.
Structure of the old web site
Simplified structure of the new web site
Research
I started off by interpreting the analytics to identify the areas of the existing website with potentially serious usability issues and conducted usability tests on the existing website to better understand how we should approach improving these areas.
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Research revealed that users generally don’t struggle to find the books they are looking for but there’s a need for a go to place for next read inspiration. In light of this finding, the strategy steered towards providing more curated sections rather than a "search and fetch the results" oriented type of experience.
Design
Before I did any tweaking on the screen designs that were handed over to me, I mapped out the user journey to have a holistic view and highlight the points that generate more value to the business as well as how they tie in with the user goals.
Penguin.co.uk user journey map
Based on the clarity the user journey map has provided, I reevaluated the designs. I first broke down the page designs into components, most of which I revamped, some I combined with others in order to simplify the development process (where it also made sense in terms of UX) and some I removed entirely as they were no longer in line with the business goals or they weren't contributing towards any user goals.
I then created a design system in form of a component library in Sketch which the Dev Team had access to through Invison. Although putting this together and keeping it up to date was time consuming it not only enabled me to streamline my prototyping process but it also made it much easier for the developers to have a go to place to be able to inspect the UI elements in isolation from the page templates.
Usability test
Usability tests revealed that even though Penguin’s Children’s brands Puffin and Ladybird are well known, users tend to navigate by age groups when they are looking for books for children and by genre when they look for books for themselves / other adults rather than brands.
Summary of the 2nd round of the usability tests
Despite the fact that the stakeholders strongly believed Penguin’s sub-brands should lead the main navigation, being presented with the facts, they were convinced to go with a structure that has a more user centred design.
Evaluation
Since the launch of the redesigned penguin.co.uk there has been an 86% increase on the clicks on the "Buy from" button (directs the users to the retailers such as Amazon and Waterstones) which is the ultimate goal of the website for the business.
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While the new site is out-performing the old one, my role still involves looking for opportunities for improvements by conducting A/B tests and experimenting as we work on the iterations.