Way-finding and Navigation

Opportunity

Site / App navigation is a balancing act of business and customer needs. Both of which impact key business metrics, as well as customer satisfaction and success. My customer experience team took on the challenge of trying to understand what the customer was missing in navigation, while balancing business and brand needs.

What we learned - The main challenge with our site(s) is that communicating brand and assortment can be challenging when there are competing goals. Simple navigation at times will be at odds with brand elevation, so we looked to leverage some easy wins of structure with some brand moments.

My Role - Direct and lead research efforts, wireframing an prototype testing. Coordination with product teams for output and strategic input to roadmaps

Research & Understand

First I looked at our internal metrics for customer behavior with navigation, showcasing the overall usage to base additional customer facing research. This allows us to establish a baseline with partners to understand actual engagement.

After getting core alignment on how our navigation is performing I was able to refine the actual usage paired with customer insights in the form of tree testing (asking customers where they expect to find products in our structure), also while running these tests looking into our 3rd party research library allows us to help ground our business partners with best practices.

For projects like navigation we also look across the competitive landscape to understand how the outside world addressed their navigation for customers.

Concepts & Prototype Testing

Once we understood the customer landscape a set of prototypes were created to understand how customers responded to some ideas for how to present navigation features and images. This was done with unmoderated usability testing. The goal was to get feedback on some elements such as information architecture, layout, and use of imagery to aid way-finding.

Once testing is completed, a short readout of testing along with other research efforts was shared with our business partners.

Outcome

Partnering between research and design, we created a kit of parts to carry into A/B testing, giving our business partners tools to elevate our brand as well as give customers an optimal information hierarchy.

Testing Hypothesis: By better aligning customer expectations with visual brand elements, we can provide a clearer and more successful product wayfinding toolkit to both business and customer needs.

Outcome - A/B test being planned based on site capabilities.