Redesigning navigation

Our small but mighty UX team recently redesigned the navigation model for Raet’s growing HR Core Business Global application. It hadn’t been touched in 2 years, so it was time to reconsider some of our choices and design something that would scale as the product continues to evolve. We spent months researching, interviewing users, testing and going back-and-forth with stakeholders to create what we have today. Here’s all the work that went into our brand-new navigation…

The problem

As a product grows, issues inevitably sneak up along the way. In our case, with new features being added at high speed, we began to notice a growing problem: our information architecture (IA). The team detected IA issues in two main areas: findability and scalability.

Findability: Our menu structure increasingly had little to no rationale behind it. Items were being grouped in no particular order, and the menu was growing in a non-logical way, making information harder to find.

Scalability: Our IA also wasn’t scalable. Pages were becoming increasingly overloaded, which led to eternal scrolling and no way to present large sets of information in a condensed way. We were also overusing our detail view; lacking clear standards as to how to use it.

Research

So, we decided to research how users navigate our app and how they organize information. We did this using a technique called card sorting. After recruiting 30 users, we gave each 30 minutes to group different labels/concepts from our application into categories that made sense to them. The goal was to see how users categorize content and where they expect to find different information. We also recorded these sessions to get the rationale behind their choices.

After going through all participants’ results, we created a similarity matrix. This matrix was a big help in visualizing similarities between the different categories chosen by users.

What we discovered

From the similarity matrix, we found 6 key categories that most users chose:

⁃ Home

⁃ Benefits

⁃ Settings

⁃ Organization

⁃ Requests

⁃ Profile

This gave us a lot to think about when it came to restructuring the app’s IA, and would guide what finally came out in the redesign.

User “struggles”

The card sorting results also revealed some reoccurring themes or “struggles” our users were facing:

- Employee or Manager? As users of an HR app, the people we interviewed see themselves, first and foremost, as employees. In other words, even while some of them are managers of teams, they first see themselves as employees that need to get things done for themselves. Having said that, managers and professional users (such as payroll administrators), also found it hard to differentiate what was for them and what was related to their team. They were missing a centralized place for team management.

- Let me get things done. We discovered that our users are very task-focused. They arrive at our application with a specific intent, they want to get things done and tick items of their to-do list. Many said they were missing a place or way to easily submit requests (e.g.: asking for a holiday, find a colleague, etc.). Some even expected to be able to complete these tasks and requests directly from the home page

- I want to get there quickly. Many users also found that too many clicks were needed to get where they wanted to go. They often have specific tasks in mind but had to go through several steps or pages before they could start their task.

The redesign

So, we got to work… Based on the research findings, 6 main design considerations guided the redesign of our navigation model:

⁃ Content needs to be separated into clear and distinct topics

⁃ The use of the detail view needs reconsideration

⁃ Clearer levels of hierarchy are needed

⁃ Jumping from one theme to another has to be easier

⁃ A funnel model is required

⁃ Everything has to be responsive

Testing and finalizing the design

Once our team had a (pretty much) final design, we got down to testing, to make sure we had it right. We tested with over 30 users of different profiles, including employees, managers, system administrators, payroll administrators and application managers. These tests highlighted areas for improvement, which we worked on before launching the new navigation model for a select group of clients.

While our work as UX designers is never finished, we are happy with the redesign, the new model and the benefits it brings. One lesson learned? A redesign done well is a full-time job.

Have you or your team ever gone through a redesign process? What did you learn from it?