Meleigha Holt
Lessons Learned
Lesson I
"No one uses navigation"
Project Overview
Redesign the navigation of an informational website for people involved in the sale of a HERO financed home.
Phases
My predecessors design took too many clicks to find a simple answer and the supporting architecture wasn’t scalable.
Usability tested a traditional navigation bar and found I was wrong.
Course correcting after usability tests confirmed "No one uses navigation."
Phase I
My Predecessor's Design
My predecessors design took too many clicks to find a simple answer and the supporting architecture wasn’t scalable.
Phase II
Testing my design
My preliminary redesign aimed to move from a question driven navigation to a more traditional scenario based header navigation.
The UX Content Strategist I was working with cautioned me “no one uses navigation.” I dismissed this advice and moved forward into user testing. Guess what happened? Test after test, users stared at the landing page and said “I’m not an agent. This isn’t for me. I would leave.” Some would scroll through the page, determined to find the answer to the usability task and ultimately admit defeat “I don’t know where I’m supposed to go."
A New Approach
Phase III
Content based navigation
With this valuable feedback from my colleague and customers, my final solution was a success. In addition to a basic, top level navigation, I brought the key scenarios into the body of the home page. The advantage of content based navigation was that it could give more context than a simply named link. For example, “Selling a Home” in the top navigation was rephrased in the body as “Are you a real estate agent looking for help? We can help you list a HERO improved home.”
