Before I became a YouSendIt employee, I was a YouSendIt user and as long as I could remember the homepage needed some work (see it archived on Flickr). It featured a large interactive Flash area that wasn’t very useful and also large in file size. Not to mention, it was using up all of the prime real estate when viewing the site at 1024x768.
It wasn’t very user friendly at all and it didn’t clearly explain what it is we do. It had also become cluttered from years of new features and promotions being added. The result was a slow loading homepage that was overloaded with content.
When the time came to redesign I first sat down with users (one-by-one) and I conducted user test after user test to try to find out what was working and what wasn’t. I found that users typically gravitated toward the send form and didn’t pay any attention to our paragraph of text that we called our “mission statement” – this was expected. Second, we needed to find out what our users typically did once they arrived at our homepage. For this we reviewed our analytical data and monitored users as they used the website (this was separate from my test).
Once we figured out what it was that our users wanted to do; we started to work on our messaging. YouSendIt has the bittersweet problem of being valuable to just about everyone so writing copy can be a challenge. The result of all of our usability testing, designing and redesigning is what’s live on yousendit.com right now. It went live last night and while we don’t have the analytical data right now to prove it – I believe it’s a success. We hope you do too.
Our user opinion’s and feedback are really
important to us and impact everything we do. If you have a chance, tell
what you think. Email us at feedback@yousendit.com.
Jon Victorino
UI Designer
