Top 3 User Experience Strategies for Beyoncé’s Website

We can’t seem to get enough of Beyoncé, and recently while I was getting my latest Beyoncé fix I found a few areas of her website where User Experience (UX) best practices could make her site more usable. Queen Bey, if you’re reading (which I’m sure you are): here are three tips to improve beyonce.com. We can’t seem to get enough of Beyoncé

Rrecently while I was getting my latest Beyoncé fix I found a few areas of her website where User Experience (UX) best practices could make her site more usable. Queen Bey, if you’re reading (which I’m sure you are): here are three tips to improve beyonce.com. 

Scrollmaps?

Everyone loves a good Beyoncé photo, but how many do we need? Currently when you go to Beyoncé’s home page, it is a series of one photo after another that you can scroll through. Sometimes lots of images on a site can slow down load time, and Google says 53% of people leave sites that take over 3 seconds to load. 

So if Beyoncé wanted to shorten her site load speed by getting rid of some of those pictures on the home page, how should she do it? Running a scroll heatmap (or scrollmap) on this site would show how deep users are scrolling down through these pictures and reveal the exact percentage of visitors that see a specific vertical position on the page.

If the scrollmap shows that most users aren’t scrolling past the fifth picture, Beyoncé might want to think of only including five images on the homepage. 

Site Search Dominance

Fifty percent of users on the entire internet are search dominant. This means that half of users are using your search function as their main point of navigation. When you type keywords in the search box on Beyoncé’s website, depending on the term it returns random, sometimes unrelated results. 

For instance, I typed “Friday” in the search box and a Kara Walker sculpture exhibition came up. I love Kara Walker, but if I was looking to see if Beyoncé was playing a show somewhere near me this Friday, Kara Walker’s Domino sugar sculpture is not going to answer my question.

Of course, it’s impossible to offer the exact answer to every query a site user enters, but it is possible to create a decent search experience.

Here Are Some Top Recommendations for Site Search:

• Help people by recommending what possible terms they meant to search for
• Have your search box on every page and put it somewhere it’s always going to be visible
• Give people the ability to sort and filter their results

Hidden Hamburgers

Often sites utilize a hamburger menu to hide main navigation links on mobile devices. A hamburger menu offers a way to condense site elements in the limited amount of space offered on a phone. Beyoncé uses a hamburger menu not only for her mobile site, but also on her desktop version. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main navigation. Users are less likely to use hidden navigation and if they do, they do it later in the process which makes tasks take longer and the overall experience more difficult.

It’s important to design different user experiences based on device. Although a hamburger menu might be the best solution for a small mobile screen, we would recommend that Beyoncé’s site use a highly visible link navigation across the top of her site for visitors on tablets and desktops.