GoDaddy Site Navigation & Information Architecture Update
Increased accuracy for global customers by 45% when browsing
GoDaddy helps over 20 million users set up and manage their online presence & commerce, and I found out that almost 65% of them had trouble finding their way on the site.
Goals & Results
- Reduce redundancy in nav to improve Google rank.
- Regained 1st page search results for key terms like ‘domain’ and ‘website’ by removing 41 links from nav, restructuring category pages, & improving the information architecture - Do no harm to incremental conversion rate when browsing from navigation or improve it
- Increased CVR by 12.8% - 80% accuracy when browsing from navigation
- Improved accuracy by 45% to 80%
People & Time
Users
- Global non-techie, nascent small business owners
- Small — mid size business owners
- Professional designers & developers
- Investors
- Stakeholders
Team & Timeline
Problems
- Many stakeholders across orgs
- We didn’t know how well the current information architecture (IA) performs, or how our users name and group our things
- Accuracy from nav should be 80%
- Wayfinding broke on category pages that didn’t link to their products
Solutions
Solution for stakeholders
To understand the needs of stakeholders regarding navigation, I conducted interviews with managers, directors, and VPs.
Through my interviews, I discovered that the biggest concern among stakeholders was related to merchandising. Specifically, there was a need to improve the way in which products were being displayed and marketed on the site.
To address the issue of merchandising, I worked with the team to identify solutions that would allow various products to be visually merchandised in the navigation system. We were able to test these ideas using prototypes to see how they would perform in practice.
Solutions for users
To learn how well the current information architecture (IA) performed I did some tree testing, and learned that users struggled to find the correct item.
Next I did an open card sort to find out what our global users named things.
I was told what to name things and how to group them :)
I reorganized and renamed our content in multiple ways.
To optimize the information architecture and improve user experience, I conducted tree testing to refine the design and achieve an accuracy rate of 80%. After testing several variations, we implemented the most effective version and saw a 11.5% increase in CVR (conversion rate) worldwide. These improvements were then shipped to production for all users to benefit from..
To further improve findability and user experience, I designed and implemented a sub-navigation menu on the category pages. This allowed users to easily locate and access all relevant products, resulting in a 1.3% increase in CVR (conversion rate).
