For an advanced SEO practitioner, chances are they need to track tons of different keywords at the same time. For one thing, they need a simple way to manage keywords. For another, a friendly dashboard to help them easily notice changes and compare data is needed. And these two were what RankingSEO fails to do.
Behind the request of a tag system are the real user pain points, which are...
Pain point 1
Users found it difficult to manage keywords. The picture below is that they show me how they do it with Excel during user interview on google meet
Pain point 2
Users found it difficult to compare the data
After understanding our users’ goal and pain points, I drafted many different concepts UI cards, then cut them out and set up sessions with team members, where I asked them to redesign the information and data table. Those drafts served as triggers to make them think.
It was a huge success! Not only was it fun, I was able to see them think out loud in a user perspective. For example, everyone mentioned to improve the information hierarchy and how data sorting. I also learned from developer team what data would be hard to show.
Ideas are fully discussed and they also added new features with post-its. e.g. What if user can pin certain keywords so that they don’t need to filter it out all the time?
After much discussion, main goals that we want users to achieve have become clearer. And these goals become the task scenarios in the following testing.
case 1 : tag & filter keywords
Here comes a task from your manager. In response to the company's goal for next month, he wants you to manipulate these 5 big data-related keywords and keep an eye on their performance, and finally export a report containing only these five words to him.
case 2 : pin the keywords (new)
Find out the keywords whose rankings are on the google first page and are improved compared to 30 days ago. And to easily track those words next time, you need to add them to the pin board.
case 3 : compare the data
You need to export all the keywords whose rankings are behind your main competitors A, C and E to your manager.
A pilot round was be hold first with my own team members. As for the second round, I recruited users from other teams in our company. We tested 5 users within 3 days.
The tag system is important but what we learn from our test is that users don’t want to be disturbed while doing the most important thing - tracking their keywords. In other words, the tag system shouldn’t be over emphasized than keyword itself. So I work closely with developer to make sure the color, the way it shows and also hides are clear but not annoying.
User can quickly filter out keywords with same tag, then compare himself with his competitors in no time.
We have made great changes in the information architecture. First, data was seperated into two tabs according to different user behaviors, tracking project keywords and comparing with competitors. Then, with appropriate titles and sorting function, it allows user to analyze information to derive insights.
Besides, a lot of effort are put on subtle improvements to make the data table more friendly, e.g. fixed header, zebra stripes, pagination and display density, sortable column and selected action
During the discussion, we noticed that questions like “ Is it clear and clean? ” or “ Is is friendly for users to compare? ” are mentioned so many times. It prompts us to think what’s the appropriate principles for our product to guide us in making decisions.
principle one : clear
A SEO practitioner gets exposed to lots of data per day. We want to make sure that every data is meaningful to them on our product.
principle two : easy-to-compare
With tons of data shown directly is useless. To make users act on it, we allow users to compare, filter and sort in order to derive insights.
