Navigation Redesign
A UX CASE STUDY
Overview
Hosting Chilli is a web hosting and domain name registration company. While the website received a lot of traffic, the developers noticed users are not spending enough time on the website and some important pages are rarely visited. My goal was to find the underlying reasons and come up with solutions that won’t increase the complexity of the site.
Below is a snippet from the analytics tool used on the site over a long period of time showing the average time spent is around 43 seconds which is considerably low.
Using generated heatmaps we were able to understand the reason behind the low visit time. Users spend a long time in the navigation section trying to figure out where to go next and end up giving up and closing the page.
Card Sorting
The first step to better navigation is gathering all the linking pages and creating a hybrid card sorting experiment with a group of two in-house engineers and three clients that agreed to participate in the test. I chose hybrid card testing to give the clients the ability to add their own categories.
All the tests had similar results in grouping the cards except one of the clients thought to create an information category that contains links to general information and Q&A. Although this isn’t a bad idea, our main goal is to keep the navigation compact and down to four main categories.
We decided to move forward with the following setting.
Having four major categories and sublinks respective of each category, would suffice to contain all the links while maintaining visual balance.
The next step is to create an icon set that is cohesive in design and easy to understand.
Next, combine the icons with their respective links in a card that should contain a title and a small description that helps the user understand what this link can do for them.
Finally, create a prototype of this navigation along with its animations before heading over to development.
And on smaller devices…
Results
After working closely with developers to bring the designs to life, we launched the test and monitored results. At the project’s inception, we documented two primary indicators of success; higher engagement and improved satisfaction. Fortunately, our users found the experience more engaging and satisfying than ever.
We increased clicks on Navigation by 22%, and average visit time by 125%.