Small Changes for Small Screen Wayfinding: Global Navigation

Our navigation was dated, but most importantly, it hadn't been updated to reflect our user's behaviors. Over the past 6 years, our mobile traffic had risen to ~80% of all site traffic. Mobile users had an experience that wasn't optimized for them, resulting in multiple taps, search interaction issues, and redundancies. Our users' primary paths for shopping required more taps than general information about the company. Data showed us our users were most likely to shop (music to our business partners' ears), but they struggled to get there. We also had redundant categories, and links with similar names but different purposes. Our internal structure of siloed teams made it more difficult for teams to update the navigation or feel a real ownership over issues. As a member of our new design strategy team, this was the perfect UX problem for us to tackle.

We started with the data. We wanted to understand both what our users could find, and what they couldn't. We tracked all the traffic to each item in the current navigation, and our most common search terms. We went through VoC and past user testing feedback to find the things our user data might not tell us. Using our UX audits, and best practice research, we also added in additional improvements to fix known issues. 

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Knowing this would be a big change, we wanted to get insights from customers before spending time in development. We created 2 prototypes for testing. Both included similar improvements, but we knew the first option would require more development work and would be a bigger visual change for users. It also allowed users a faster path to primary actions, and had more potential for future personalization.

We completed 2 rounds of user testing to get feedback from both current and potential customers. Testing validated our assumption that the larger development effort option would also be the best for users. 72% of our users preferred the first option, but they also gave us valuable feedback about what needed improvements and what they loved and hated from the second option. Our business partners and leaders were hesitant to implement our first option, but after sharing our research, successful websites using similar implementations, and user feedback, we were able to persuade them. We partnered with IT to split the effort into sprint-sized work, and set up an analytics dashboard to track improvements.

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Results: Though still in incremental development, we saw immediate traffic improvement for all 3 shopping paths, with our highest priority page receiving a 25% uptick. 

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