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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Exploration
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. |
User Research
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
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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