Blank Canvas vs. Guided Texts? A Multi-Group Usability Study
CHALLENGE
If you’ve ever explored building a website to showcase your work or sell something, You may have heard the term “website template.” How much work do you think the template does for you, and how much do you think comes from you outside of that template? The Templates team’s analytics partner discovered users’ interest in starting with a “blank template,” but the blank templates didn’t make people subscribe to the website more easily (details edited/omitted in this writeup due to confidentiality). In the meantime, the design team had come up with a “guided version” of the blank template, aiming at better guiding people to use the blank template.
The team was curious: what about a “blank template” that intrigues people, and what are people’s experiences with it? Do these guided texts help people start building their websites more easily?
We had about 6 weeks to answer these questions.
TEAM
PM, designer, data analytics partner
RESEARCH APPROACH
Semi-structured interviews
Usability task: each participant experiences one version (blank version or guided version)
RECRUITMENT
n=16
7 inexperienced website builders: have never published a site
9 experienced website builders: have published a site
ALL are interested in building a new website
PROTOCOL
The researcher (I) would conduct a warm-up interview to understand each participant’s experience in building websites and the main challenges that hold them back. Then, the researcher would direct them to the Squarespace templates’ (live) page
ANALYSIS
I analyzed data into two groups
participants’ attitudes: before they land on Blank Template (when they click on the CTA) and after landing on it.
participants’ performance: what they decided to do first on the template after I (researcher) asked them to start editing for their site in mind.
We also looked into consistencies and differences between the two groups of participants (inexperienced vs. experienced) in the data categories above.
INSIGHTS & OUTCOMES
One major finding from the study showed that people’s expectation of a “Blank Template” is different from what their experience is upon editing. Through synthesizing their expectation, we learned how the current version of Blank Template was not meeting their needs for a flexible, customizable template as a starting point.
It was also interesting to learn how the system could create more frustrations for experienced website builders than beginner website builders, and how participants could be overwhelmed by guidance text (attitude) but achieved many tasks at the end (performance).
These findings provided a deeper understanding of (1) users’ expectations and first impression of Blank Template, (2) users’ challenges in editing Blank Template, and (3) which version (“blank canvas” vs. “guided texts”) is a better starting point experience for users.