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BACKGROUND

A couple of years back I developed the following community-driven lyrics website. I dabble on the musical instrument Bağlama and we often sit as a group on the evenings, drink and sing. We made up lyrics because we couldn't remember them, and I thought, this can't go on. We need a good resource for lyrics!

I am currently working on a re-write to improve performance and teach myself a few pieces of new technologies (.Net Core API for the back-end and ReactJS for the front-end).

DECISION STRUGGLE

Content on the site doesn't change often, and right now user engagement isn't very good. I have some cool users who submit every now and then, but the majority (99%) do not bother submitting anything.

With the current site, I am sure this is due to a variety of factors (bad UX being one).

In a bid to increase user engagement, one of the things I was thinking of implementing was infinite scrolling, but I am not sure if that's a good idea for a site like mine.

CURRENT FACTS

Here are some facts about the site:

  • Users do not submit often and thus content does not change often
  • Majority of users are mobile users, I'm guessing they're people like our group who are sat down in a gathering drinking and singing, so they just try and look up lyrics on their phone!
  • Google Analytics. Notice that most traffic is mobile which makes sense.
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  • I've not looked at your site, but off the top of my head I don't see how "infinite scroll" could help (or hinder) user-engagement and the encouragement of users to submit lyrics. (I'm not even sure what it would mean on a "lyric site" -- no lyrics I know of are of infinite length [although some seem it!]). If there's something specific to your site that makes you think it might help, it may be worth editing the question with those reasons and/or screen shots.
    – TripeHound
    Aug 23, 2017 at 8:57
  • It is more the scrolling of artists and their lyrics. Once you click on a particular lyric, you're right, there won't be pagination or infinite scrolling on there.
    – J86
    Aug 23, 2017 at 8:58

1 Answer 1

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I think you need to carry out a few tasks to understand your visitors and the engagement with the site.

It's apparent from your post you don't really know why people use your site and engagement, as you admit, is poor.

I would suggest created 2-3 personas (perhaps more) detailing who uses the site, how they will use it and why would they use it.

Once you understand those factors you can use a few exercises to understand the content/functionality that needs pushing to the top of your site, so you can make it easier to access by your users, this includes registration.

I struggled to find any lyrics, which could be a problem.

Furthermore, the heavy front-loading of the site is having a detrimental effect on yours users, our 100MB corporate connection still took 8-9 seconds for your site to load.

I think that's some good starting points.

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  • Performance definitely needs improving, that's something I'm working on in the re-write that I'm doing. Say I manage to get 3 real people that use the site (cause I think I can), what would be good, revealing questions I could ask? Or if you can point me to a resource, that would help too
    – J86
    Aug 23, 2017 at 9:09
  • I think you're in a good position, if you have access to some real users of the site, to carry out some user testing, this will give you good insight into the questions I raised, why do they use it? How do they use it? What are the pain points? What works well? What works less well? This will drive information that you can change that will have a real impact on your users and, hopefully, increase engagement.
    – DarrylGodden
    Aug 23, 2017 at 9:29

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