Seafood Watch: How can we improve the search experience?

Analytics • Info Viz • Mockups

Project Overview

Seafood Watch is a project of Monterey Bay Aquarium that aims to spread knowledge about sustainable seafood and provides recommendations to businesses and everyday seafood consumers to reduce the negative impact of the seafood industry on the oceans. The new Seafood Watch website launched on 2nd December, 2020. Our team analyzed the user search behavior and journey through the website and provided suggestions to improve it.

Process

After 2 initial meetings with our client, we got to know their main goals for this project, get familiar with the different analytics tools they were utilizing and data they thought we might find useful. Our team found slight discrepancies between the two tools available to us, Google Analytics and SiteImprove, even though they presented similar trends.

We decided to use Google Analytics in order to maintain consistency. This also made it incredibly easy and smooth to connect the data to Google Data Studio, which we used to create the dashboard. Our follow up meeting where we presented the dashboard to the client went successfully as they were pleased with the data we had collected – it was what they were looking for and plenty more. Other than putting together the dashboard with relevant KPIs and charts on each page, we also pulled data visualizations from Google Analytics to inform our insights and created mockups using Adobe CC.

Some limitations of Google Data Studio were that we could not show the behavior flow on it efficiently or an overall picture of the percentage of users conducting searches, visiting recommendation pages, downloading pdfs and how these overlapped.

Results

Our findings are recommendations were categorized as follows, in order of significance: Search, User Journey, Traffic Analysis, PDF Downloads.

How are users searching?

The Seafood Watch website home page has a search tool where visitors can look up recommendations for specific seafood species. In this report, we refer to that as a Search Block in order to distinguish it from the Global Search bar.

11.4% of website visits contain Site Search usage. Although this may seem small, we got a better idea of the volume when we found that over the month of April (2021) there were 14,218 unique searches.

SEARCH LOCATION

• Most users search using the Global Search bar.


• As shown in Fig.1, the Global Search has a much higher percentage of Search Exits (70.32%) compared to the Recommendations page search (18.28%) even though the first only has about 22% more total unique searches than the latter. Its Average Search Depth, Time after Search and % Search Refinements are also high, indicating that users refine their search multiple times and click into different pages to find what they are looking for, meaning the Global Search is not convenient for them. After our final presentation to the client we confirmed this as our client has received multiple customer complaints about the Global Search.

• As we can see in Fig.2, most users starting on the Home Page get to the recommendations by using the Search Block and selecting “Best Choice” (9.68%) or navigating to the Recommendations Search Page (8.77%). They are least likely to use Global Search (4.45%) from here.
  
  However, as the previous findings state, most users use Global Search, meaning users must be relying on it from other pages.

SEARCH TERMS

• The treemap in Fig.4 shows that most users search for specific fish species. "Salmon” is the most searched term by a large amount. However, the Google Analytics account currently separates search terms by case, making it difficult to accurately visualize the distribution of the terms.

How can we improve the search experience?

MAKE RECOMMENDATIONS SEARCH EASILY VISIBLE

As we know from the Search Location Findings most users search using the Global Search, and most users who land on the Home Page do not use the Global Search. This would mean that users are relying more on the Global Search from the other pages of the website, and the Recommendations Page could be one example.

There is no search bar immediately discoverable upon entering the Recommendations page, as shown in Fig.6. On mobile, it even requires an extra step. The low visibility of the Recommendations Search bar compared to the Global Search bar could be the reason most users type into the latter on a page like this. As most users are searching for species and almost half are searching on mobile devices, we thought it would help to make the Recommendations Search bar visible upon entering the page.

Instead of each “narrow by” filter having their own search bar, there could be one visible search bar and the filters could be drop-downs with either all or most popular options shown inside them. Mockup 1, designed by me, shows one way of doing this.

GUIDE USERS WITH PREDICTIVE SEARCH OR A POPULAR PAGES LIST

One possible reason users may be selecting “Best Choice” on the Search Block more often when they are on the Home Page instead of entering specific searches could be that they are not sure what to search for. Removing the word “species” may make this search bar seem less specific. Adding predictive search will also help by guiding users with ideas. Alternatively, a section could be added on the homepage listing the most popular Recommendation pages to help users get started.

REMOVE CASE-SENSITIVITY FOR SEARCH TERMS ON GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Remove case-sensitivity for search terms on Google Analytics to visualize search term related results more accurately. With the help of our professor, we found that a filter can be added to the Google Analytics account to do so. This link shows how it can be done.

How are users exploring content?

LANDING PAGES

• Majority of users start their journey on the Home Page.


• Users who start on the Home Page spend on average 4:19 mins and view 5.7 pages per session. Those who start on the Recommendations section spend on average 5:26 mins and view 7.12 pages per session. This indicates users are engaged and curious to explore more content when accessing from these pages, as they spend 1-2 minutes longer and view 2-3 pages more compared to other sections of the website.

POPULAR SECTIONS AND PAGES

• The top section of the website is the Recommendations Section (576,663 unique pageviews), followed by Species Recommendation Pages (141,953 unique pageviews) (Fig.9, Left). This is in line with Seafood Watch’s goal as users are spending the most time accessing the seafood recommendation database.


• If we look at the individual pages, we can see the most popular page is the Home Page (178,083 unique pageviews), followed by the Global Search Page (55,012 unique pageviews), and Recommendations Search Page (48,928 unique pageviews) (Fig.9, Right). Even though users are searching on the website they tend to use the Global Search over the Recommendations Search page.

EXIT PAGES

• The top exit pages include the Fishing and Farming Methods Page (70.31% % Exit) with a bounce rate of 70.31%, and the Download Consumer Guides Page (55.8% %Exit) with a bounce rate of 38.48%.

BEHAVIOR FLOW

• If we look at the user flow for two popular pages, we can see in over 1k sessions, 92.8% of users starting on the Fishing and Farming Methods Page and 83.9% of users starting on the Download Consumer Guides Page will drop off than continue their website journey.


• Users are also more likely to visit the Global Search page or other popular pages than navigate to the Recommendations Search Page.

How can we encourage users to continue searching recommendations?

ADD A RECOMMENDATIONS SEARCH BLOCK ON POPULAR PAGES

Even though Fishing and Farming Methods Page and Download Consumer Guides Page are the top landing and popular pages, they are also the top exit pages with the highest bounce rates. However, the average time users spend on the pages is 6:11 minutes and 2:46 minutes respectively, higher than other pages. This shows that users are engaged with the content here before exiting.

As shown in mockups 2 and 3 designed by my teammate Janet, we suggested adding a recommendations search block or links to other popular pages would:

• Lower bounce rate for landing and popular pages
• Increase average pages visited per session
• Navigate away from Global Search to Recommendations Search
• Encourage users to use search recommendations and continue their website journey

Further Findings and Recommendations

For Traffic and PDF Download related insights view the full Evaluation Report.

Client Feedback

The insights were presented to our client over a Zoom call. Even though mainly communicated with one Seafood Watch representative throughout the process, we presented to 5 representatives who all work in the web design, analytics and user experience departments. I demonstrated the dashboard functionalities to them and our team answered their questions. The presentation went successfully as our client team gave us positive feedback and found our findings and recommendations extremely helpful and feasible to implement. Our project covered the initial goals and even more.

Key Takeaways

Throughout the project, some key takeaways for me were:

• Edit down content – Since our team had 4 members and we were all gathering data relating to different things, we ended up gathering too much data at one point. It was a challenge to downsize what we had, but made sense considering the main project goals.


• Assigning tasks early on – I noticed it was difficult to maintain consistency of language, layout and format throughout the documents we produced as we were each tackling a large amount of content. In the end I took the responsibility of going through the body of work to edit and create consistency. It would have been helpful to assign separate Presentation design and Copy Editor roles in the beginning.