[Hannah_OWID]

Any really honest feedback on the usability of our website would be the best thing for us.

We have lots of content - spanning everything from population growth to plastic pollution, income inequality to cancer rates. This is of course a key part of our work. But this could make it difficult for people to find what they're looking for.

Do you manage to find it easy to navigate? Is there anything you would recommend we do to make it easier for people to find content?

[arikr]

You might find some of the usability testing services useful also

There's a list of some here:

http://www.usefulusability.com/usertesting-alternatives/

and here

https://www.producthunt.com/alternatives/usertesting-2

They give you videos with people's out loud thoughts about for example trying to accomplish specific goals with your sites, which should be really useful.

And for a more guerrilla approach you might find this article useful:

https://medium.com/@leemunroe/how-our-product-design-team-co...

[Hannah_OWID]

Great recommendations. Thanks for the tips. We've found it really useful recently to sit next to someone in person and ask them to navigate. It reveals a lot of unexpected outcomes just by watching them use the site.

But of course, in-person testing can be tricky to scale so an online service is exactly what we're looking for. We'll check them out!

[slumos]

Tufte gives his class in SF once a year I think. I cannot recommend it enough.

[mushufasa]

I think the navigation bar is very busy. It shows up over multiple lines, with different sized and shaded buttons. On mobile/tablet, it takes multiple screen lengths. It seems overwhelming and unfocused.

Perhaps because the navigation is overwhelming, you decided to duplicate your dropdown menu for most of the landing page.

I'm not sure why there is such an emphasis on your media coverage and authors at the top of the landing page. Usually that is a tactic to build social proof for customers feel comfortable buying from a new/unknown startup, but as far as I can tell you're not trying to make a sale.

It took me several clicks to get to an article with an interactive graph -- the cool part. More than just the data, you had good writing in catchy, accessible prose.

My suggestions would be

1) to highlight one cool / recent article+graph at the top of the landing page.

2) Simplify your topic organization; you have 16 different high-level topics, with further subtopics. That relegates you to an unwieldy dropdown. I realize you may be using the SDGs, but I'd prefer 5-6 MECE categories like Environment, Health, Economic Development... into which you can organize SDGs. If you had fewer categories you could fit navigation tabs or make use of UI techniques.

3) Overall, decide on what flow you want from the user and design around it. You have a newsletter, donation, even another web domain for SDG tracking. Who are your primary constituents, and what are you trying to help them accomplish? Is it to delight and educate laypersons, maximize small-dollar donations, highlight the academic rigor of the authors' analysis...?

As a reader, I would come back to the site often if it focused on showing me all the coolest data analysis. I might even browse there instead of Hacker News.

Right now, though, it seems closer in my mind to the World Bank's Open Data website, which has an overwhelming amount of great open data, which I would only visit if I were looking to access a raw dataset.

If lay readership is your primary goal, I would suggest looking for design inspiration from media publications like https://fivethirtyeight.com/ or https://www.newyorker.com/ . Even xkcd.com, which has dated design language, achieves the UX of putting the catchy content up front, and providing navigation for people who want more, rather than the other way around.

[Hannah_OWID]

Thanks so much for this detailed feedback on the website and our design flow. It's really valuable to get an honest critique of how people find using the site.

These questions/issues of navigation, landing page, structure are all things we're grappling with at the moment and have been making small tweaks then reviewing what difference this makes to how visitors explore.

The rationale for highlighting media coverage and academic citations of our work near the top of the landing was to highlight that we're a trusted source for many publications (and actually from media on both the right and left). Credibility and trust are of course important to our work. But it's interesting to hear it wasn't an important factor for you as a visitor.

Thanks again for your thoughts. We're working on all of this at the moment, and will incorporate all of these suggestions into our discussions of how to do this best.

[mushufasa]

I think the rigor of the data-driven analysis speaks for itself in terms of credibility and trust, and is the unique strength of your initiative to highlight. Your 'about' page is already very strong to demonstrate your organization and affiliations.