BackgroundThis travel community launched in 2009 as a way to connect with exclusive loyalty program members and share their travel experiences, photos, suggestions, and questions. Growth intensified in 2012 with the introduction of a proprietary Hotel Review system. However, the influx of new users did not translate into as much engagement as anticipated within the broader community. After monitoring data and talking with users, we decided to finally tackle the overlooked navigational issues.
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Goals
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Original State
The initial navigation looked great, but was disproportionately tall and caused unnecessary scrolling with every page view. While the primary navigation linked to filtered views of site-wide content, each by specific types of content.
Exploration
User PersonasBernard, Margaret and Jake are very different personalities, but they all love travel and desire intuitive and easy to use experiences.
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Mapping Sections and ContentI started by drawing our current navigation with the goal of improving my ability to find my way between specific sections. It was immediately clear the majority of our navigation linked to specific types of content, not sections or topics.
So I mapped out all of the existing discussion areas, groups and blogs that users would navigate between. But with limited space, I needed to determine which links to include. |
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Initial ConceptIn this first concept, I focused on eliminating unnecessary links and nestled all of the site's various sections into a tidy "Directory" link and modal. The idea was to minimize customization against the core platform while shuffling a few other links around.
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Concept Sketches
We figured the submenu could take several formats from a show/hide list, to a long menu with columns or even tabs that reveal different sets of columns. All of which seemed reasonable, but we were reluctant of that level of customization.
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User Research
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With a screenshot of the homepage and a colored wireframe from Adobe Illustrator, we put this concept in front of 26 users to gauge their reaction. We asked them to rate the importance of specific elements, how easily this could help them switch sections, and their overall reaction.
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Link PrioritizationAs revealing as these results appear, we knew from previous research that users explicitly wanted to "find specific content" and "navigate between sections". So while bookmarks are seldom used and the last priority of users, in contrast, the search bar shouldn't be the most important navigational element. So we knew there was more to the story and our work was not done.
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Room For ImprovementWith a generally positive reaction to the new navigation, we were clearly headed in the right direction. But we knew that we wanted to push further to make it easier to "find specific content". In looking back at our concept, users still had to navigate a dropdown menu to switch between our main forum areas where the vast majority of activity occurs - we needed to totally reshuffle our navigation.
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Back to the Drawing Board
Refined NavigationWe took a hard look at all of the navigational links and began eliminating most of the generic system links. We replaced them with the four main forums and a new "Community" link to encapsulate much of the others.
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Fixed-Width Instead of Fluid-Width
On large monitors, our previous navigation would appear disjointed because they'd appear on opposite sides of the screen. Going forward we would restrict the width to help users easily scan the page from left to right.
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Wireframes of New NavigationArmed with a core framework and a new list of prioritized links, new wireframes took shape. And this time we decided to use a dropdown menu to reveal the categories for each specific forum. For the first time a user could easily and explicitly locate "Family Vacation" or "Redemption" or "Packing" information from the main navigation.
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Final ExecutionWith its launch, we saw immediate improvements to activity and engagement data across both forums and Hotel Reviews.
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