By Realization...
Recently, I went through the process of updating this here website, it was a good 2 weeks of work, in between client priorities. Once I had finished, I scrolled through each page and made sure it was all in order and buttons worked etc… and I sat in my chair still for a second and thought “Man, this is way better than the last website” and I thought the last version was great when I published it…
My next immediate thought was “huh…Iteration is pretty powerful”
And so here I am writing a blog about it.
I’ve always understood the general idea of building upon something to make it better, but this logic in my brain was put into more specificity when I started the Game Development degree with Falmouth Uni. Some of the first theories and principals they were desperately trying to bash into our heads (I now understand why), were Agile methodology and somewhat within that Iteration.
Iteration is most widely described as: “the repetition of a process in order to generate a sequence of outcomes. Each repetition of the process is a single iteration, and the outcome of each iteration is then the starting point of the next iteration.”
During smaller university projects (Pre Studio 316), its was certainly thrown around a lot in team conversations after lectures on the topic and i’d hear team members say “yeah lets iterate on that” or “We can iterate on it later” but it felt for the most part that it was said with somewhat empty meaning.
In part maybe because I didn’t quite understand how to effectively use the principals or even the concept itself fully at this point, but also because we probably just weren’t doing it right.
It was only really going into the final year with the current studio 316 team that I started to get a solid grasp on the iterative process within games and now I feel I am starting to apply those principals outside of games too, like with the studio website.
Where to start...
Before I started the process of updating the website, I spent a good week or so looking through the site’s analytics and user behaviour to really find out where I needed to make those changes. In the same way if it were a game, I would have it in front of testers, and analyse the most used routes, weapons, side quests etc, and of course the opposite and what is not used at all when it is there to be used.
It didn’t take me long to see a relatively large glaring issue in that, the bounce rates and drop offs from just the home page were relatively high.
Bounce rates (In google Analytics anyway) are determined by the amount of users that opened a site page and stayed only on that page without browsing further. Having a bounce rate below 50% is the ideal and with the older website version, our site average across all the pages was around 75%…not ideal at all.
It is important to note here that, if your home page is a single page site in which you don’t need to drive users to further interactions then a bounce rate that is high is fine.
Session time is also something I’ve been keeping a keen eye on. Obviously the important thing here is that a higher session duration means someone spent more time looking at your site. which is what you want.
The website is not the only scenario in which I’ve noticed my iterative process improving, the studios’ pitches for various things like games and investment were also areas in which I saw the iterative process working its magic.
Making Changes…
We are fortunate enough to have a good connection of industry heads through things like the Falmouth Launchpad and our previous stint with Tranzfuser, which enabled us to regularly practice pitch, get feedback and advice and then use that to update the pitch before setting up another practice with another industry head(s).
This consistent and continued approach allowed us to evolve our pitches over the course of about 4 months to a point we were happy with. But after about a 2 month period of no pitches or work done on the pitches, coming back to it and instantly seeing areas to improve and make the content better.
The length of time within each cycle of iteration doesn’t have to be a short period of time, like with the website and pitch. Without having a time restraint, it almost opens the opportunity to gain some insight and experience in design, user experience or whatever it is you are working towards over that time in other areas of work and revisiting it with a refreshed outlook to re-ignite that iterative process once more.
Looking at the website’s changes, I focused on readability and easy engagement. Looking to make the information on the page much easier to see and read, decluttering and making the sections within the home page have easy to find and meaningful “More info” buttons making it easier for users to go to a page to find more about what they were reading initially.
It was my intention with the changes to target the analytics I had outlined previously making it so that if the session was “Bounced”, the user would still be able to gather plenty of information without needing to interact a second time. And as mentioned before also making buttons for sections more obvious and clear, driving those second interactions and attempting to stop the high drop off rate from the home page.
These before and afters present the changes relatively well and there is clear improvement on the home page. This kind of improvement is reflected throughout the site.
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- Before
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- After
The Theory Behind It...
Jesse Schell has a whole chapter on Iteration in his book “The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses”, and the chapter starts with “The Game Improves Through I Iteration”.
The first version of your “product” in this case a website or pitch, will almost always never be the last and final version. It’s pretty likely, as in my case, you will throw one away. But that is not to say that the first version was useless because a large part of the iterative process is having a product in front of users to receive feedback from and learn lessons, with which you iterate on.
In the same book, Jesse Schell also outlines the Agile Manifesto, an evolution in the understanding and principles of software development which, if you know of Agile and are in Game Dev you most certainly know by now, that it has shaped the modern process of design and iteration and heavily influenced the workflows of game creation.
One of the main points of the Agile Manifesto states that the practice prefers “working software and responding to change” over “Comprehensive Documentation and following a plan”. In using these principles in the process of iterating on the website, I was getting a first version up and available for users to see, getting analytics on the site’s performance and making sure I had working software with which I can then respond to changes with.
These kinds of principles being applied through the game development process is a massively powerful tool. And they also obviously prove useful outside of game dev too in the process of design and creation of things that are created with an end user or recipient in mind. Reading through these resources over the last months has been hugely insightful.
It made me think that perfectionism is almost the killer of the iterative process because, in a true iterative process, the product is always evolving, changing and improving based on current and past user experience and feedback. Being too perfectionist about the product and being reluctant to get a version out there and tested before its “perfect” is what would ultimately be the product’s demise.
Fin
Anyway, those are my thoughts, I am most certainly not an expert on iteration, a mere novice in Skyrim skill tree terms, plenty of learning yet to do but this is just the start and I’m starting to see where the most powerful tools to enhance the studio and i’s creation processes are. Hopefully soon I’ll be an apprentice.
I will be doing a review of the new website after 3 or so months of uptime, looking at the analytics and the difference in the two sites. I also plan to run an ad campaign to mirror one we ran previously and review the difference in statistics and behaviour. I will write another blog
I hope you enjoyed this read, if you saw it to the end, thanks for sticking around and I hope you got something out of it!
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