The Problem
Although Dr. Laundry is the best source for organic traffic to clorox.com, the client noticed that people weren't exploring additional content or learning about their products. They wanted us to help them change that. First, I did a quick heuristic to document usability problems. I uncovered a lack of section navigation ultimately preventing people from getting to other questions Dr. laundry answered. Second, the articles were not tagged, so find-ability through site search was nearly impossible. Third, there weren't any crosslinks to related articles or other contextual pieces of content. Fourth, there was no clear way to ask Dr. Laundry a question.
Content Audit
What this uncovered was that there was a need to understand what articles existed and try to create some organization of the content to provide ways for people to navigate through it all. There were 1,000's of articles going back to 2006. We started with 10% of the articles to audit. We wanted to see if there were major categories bubbling up to the top. Along, the way we tagged each article by topic and product highlighted within it.
Category & Topic Clustering
After going through about 10% of the content we were noticing many related topics & subtopics emerging.
Content Organization Recommendation
Once we completed the entire audit we had a clear idea of categories, sub-categories, tertiary categories and in some instances fourth level categories. We also crafted a tagging system for the articles so that they can be easily searched and sorted by the user. Additionally this informed a navigation structure for find-ability of dr. laundry content as well as internal search results.
The Results
On average before the re-architecture of Dr. Laundry on Clorox.com, Clorox would receive on average about 4 Dr. Laundry submissions every 3 months. In 3 weeks after our Dr. Laundry updates went live, over 125 Dr. Laundry submissions were received. Clorox is both excited and overwhelmed by the positive response (Dr. Laundry has been working overtime to answer people’s questions)!