Improving user navigation

For those interested in exactly how and why we apply UX research to the design process to organise a new taxonomy (how we categorise and assign products to various levels within the system) and deliver the ideal navigation system for your users, please download our eGuide, Improving eCommerce Performance Through Taxonomy.

We’ll cover many of the main points in this article, but for a deeper dive into the details, the guide explains everything you need to know in one easy-to-digest document.

Understanding your users to give them exactly what they need

Whether you’re a relatively small, medium or giant e-commerce provider, operate a SaaS platform, or provide masses of content, ensuring a seamless and enjoyable experience means delivering a well-organised and easy-to-understand navigation system.

Let’s consider your existing user interface and taxonomy. Who decided how they would operate and what each element—categories and products—should be called? Your design team? Your stakeholders? Your purchasing or marketing department? And how often do you update it to reflect your users’ needs and trends within your industry?

Too many businesses operate on old or out-of-date user interfaces and platforms set up by stakeholders, designers, or marketers, built on personal assumptions and biases. Surely, if the goal is ensuring your users are happy, engaged, and spending (and spending regularly), we should create the system they want while aligning it with our needs.

Why is UI navigation so important?

You might think you’ve got your navigation sorted; after all, you can find what you’re looking for, and if not, there’s always the search bar, right?

Sadly, if the product or process your users are looking for isn’t where they’d expect it to be or is bundled in an area that doesn’t make sense to them, they’ll soon become frustrated and leave your site or app for one that offers them a better and easier experience.

Identifying such issues allows you to create an effective problem statement at the define stage (problem statements are typically created during the discovery phase of our projects) to drive the research and goals required of your system. When done correctly, your goals will drive a better user experience and meet your stakeholders’ needs, including:

• Boosting conversion rates
• Filling data gaps
• Delivering more efficient analytics
• Enhanced SEO and visibility

A well-designed problem statement summarises the key issues and keeps your UX and design teams on the same page, developing potential solutions and working towards the same goals. Ultimately, happier users experiencing fewer pain points will deliver loyalty, increase conversion rates, and improve more about your website and app.

Identifying the Problem

This is where a problem statement shows its value. A UX problem statement describes the issue your team or teams need to be focussed on solving. A great deal of work follows the initial exploration of the problem space, and our UX problem statements ensure that everyone involved understands and sticks to what’s important.

Before we can give our users what they need, we need to understand what we want from them and where we might already be going wrong. These things drive the problem statements we hope will help us achieve our best outcomes.

User research is at the heart of the design thinking process, but we can shine a little light on where, how, what, and why each user pain point happens before we employ any of the various user discovery techniques. To do this, we:

• Review the existing navigation and carry out an audit of all platforms
• Explore analytical data to understand the current user search behaviour better, browse behaviour, the risks of removing or relocating content, and alternatively, the benefits of removing redundant items
• Carry out competitor navigation evaluations and analysis
• Conduct stakeholder research and workshops to understand the business needs

As outlined in our eGuide, we operate a four-stage approach to delivering a new, user-centric taxonomy and navigation system. As you’ll see, user feedback and usability testing are essential to the design process.

1. Analytics review—To try to understand current operations.
2. Stakeholder and customer research—We run qualitative and quantitative sessions with the target audience and operation stakeholders to see if the user’s problem aligns with the stakeholder’s. We use these findings to create a recommended taxonomy and navigation container.
3. Evaluation—We then evaluate the suggested system with the client and propose further user research via A/B testing to tweak and improve its function.
4. Governance—Implementing a new navigation system is only half the battle. To ensure clients and their teams adhere to our findings and methodology, we provide a document full of guidelines that help keep the new system scalable should any problem occur after the project is completed.

User Feedback

Customer research provides our essential point of view. Without it, we’re developing any potential solutions based on guesswork and internal biases. User research and feedback provide reliable data on where each problem occurs and how that problem affects the bigger picture.

For improved navigation, quantitative research helps us identify reliable naming and grouping priorities, and qualitative research confirms key groupings and highlights areas of ambiguity.

User feedback also reveals areas of confusion within product naming conventions, misleading category and product applications, and problematic architectures, all delivered through a concise description directly from your user groups.

Usability Testing

Usability testing typically takes the form of open and closed card testing for the initial exploration, followed by A/B testing and tree testing to finetune new prototypes.

Open card sorting allows users to create their own categories; closed card sorting uses pre-defined categories, and with hybrid card sorting, they can add their own categories to those already defined.