The outcome
Scalable navigation
Consistent UI elements
Better visibility into menu items
Observations
It was visible that features were being hidden and the platform lacked visual hierarchy. For years the mentality had been “show what we have so users know it’s there.” However, with each release we began shoehorning new features into the navigation. We not only were creating a disjointed experience but we were losing valuable vertical and horizontal real estate.
We interviewed key stakeholders as well as Customer Success and Sales team members in order to further understand the problems we were solving for.
Objectives
1. Increase engagement in the platform
Improve visibility and engagement for all features and functionality.
Develop a scalable navigation that will enable visibility and implementation for future features.
2. Improve user workflow while completing tasks
Develop consistent UI that can be applied throughout the platform.
Simplify areas that have duplicate functionality.
The Solution
One of the most challenging parts of this project was with each step we found more opportunities to better the experience. Where we were able to spend time we improved what we could but we had many conversations determining what would be prioritized as MVP vs. updates in later phases.
Handoff Process
During the redesign we began incorporating Invision and Zeplin into our handoff process. We wanted to increase transparency and communication with our offshore developers. Through multiple conversations talking through current painpoints and possible solutions we established and documented a flow that was implemented across the product department.
Retrospective
Defining objectives, communicating the needs of the users with stakeholders and developing a handoff process with our offshore developers were challenges as we were taking on a lot and proposing many changes from a product and process perspective. However, through those challenges it was a great learning experience for everyone involved.
After the release we saw an increase in usage in a majority of our menu items as well as overall positive feedback on the changes made. We also saw communication with our development team increase which was great in building relationships and ultimately changed the culture to be more collaborative by integrating teams throughout the design process early and often.