PCWORLD India is a popular magazine among gadget lovers in India. The magazine provides wellresearched, reliable and easily understandable information on different gadgets entering the market.
Making an online home for the magazine and make it stand out among similar sites was the challenge. IDG India, the publisher of the magazines wanted to replicate the success of the magazine on their online property PCworld.in. They wanted a site that was distinct and left a clear impression in the minds of the readers as well as advertisers. With print revenues declining through the industry, IDG India wanted online to work as an additional source of revenue.
To make PCWorld.in stand out and be regarded as an authentic, trustworthy online advisor on gadgets, we decided to make the site 'opinionated'.
Innumerable choices, according to a recent behavioural study, confuse a buyer rather than help him decide. Browsing through 100 camera options, similar in various aspects, slows down rather than aids a person’s decision to buy a particular camera. How does a user ultimately come to a decision, then? Most probably by asking a friend who has been through the same decision making process.
We positioned PCWorld as this well-informed dependable friend who guides you through the entire process of making a choice and finally help you buy the product that suits your needs. PCWorld would perform the filtration function for the user by not covering every possible product in a particular category, but by choosing the Top 5 gadgets in each category!
How did PCWorld gear up for this? The magazine has a specialised laboratory that examines every gadget, rates it based on performance, features and price and gives an unbiased opinion on the product to their readers, who in the absence of the lab have nothing but the information given by the advertiser to fall back on when buying a gadget.
We carried over the function of this lab into the site and used that as our USP to make PCWorld.in different—to make it opinionated.
Placed Upfront
Gadget sites are a comprehensive repertoire of information, mostly unnecessary and outdated. Our belief in the filtration philosophy and talking only about the top 5 was strong. This philosophy needed expression in the form of the website design too.To amplify our stand of being 'opinionated' and trustworthy in this information heavy world, we decided to make a radical design decision: PCWorld.in WILL NOT SCROLL!
Research suggests that users of the web today do not mind scrolling, but our choice to not scroll was not a usability decision, it was a brand decision. The layout made the top five gadgets in that category prominent while making the site look uncluttered. With less content on a page, the amount of quality time spent on the page increases. The urge to see everything available on an information-heavy page with a cursory glance at each part could now be converted into quality time spent on each piece the customer wanted to read on that gadget. So we put the customer in the front seat and give them only the information needed at that point.
The management at IDG was very sure that PCWorld.in needs to sustain itself with advertising revenues. And our design philosophy had just reduced the screen real estate to one fourth. We worked around this by creating new ways to advertise online.Advertisement spots have become blind spots, failing to attract any attention from site visitors, leaving possibilities of a click even further behind. It was necessary then that we experiment with new advertisement formats, which are relevant and usable by a visitor.PCWorld now includes sponsor spaces in the form of paid tickers on the website, advertising specific services like a toll free number or a service centre number. These plain text ads come without any embellishments and appear across the site wherever relevant to the customer.
New Ad Slots
An Online Shop
The PCWorld shop is a logical extension of the customer’s choice and need. A manufacturer can put up their product page on PCWorld to help the customer buy a particular gadget. This makes sustains a flow in the information-purchase process.
Sticky Success
The redesign has visibly increased the quality time spent on the site. The average page views per visitor is a high 4.5 and the average time spend per visitor is more than 4 minutes. The success of this format is visible also in the way manufacturers are lining up to announce their presence on PCWorld’s top five products in their website.
