Navigation updates
Redesigning global navigation components around users’ actions, and in-page navigation to provide flexibility for page layouts.
At a glance
Role: Design Lead
Timeline: Spring - Summer 2023
Activities: Information architecture, workshop facilitation, creating mockups, design systems
Redesign goals
When reconceptualizing the navigation on the site, we set out with the following goals:
Drive users toward Award Search as the primary feature
Group features in plain-language categories based on the user actions they support
Update the sidebar in-page navigation to allow for more horizontal space in our page layouts, making more room for wider tables and data visualizations
Whiteboarding
We created a whiteboard to show how the current feature groupings across global navigation mapped to proposed new groups.
Partnering closely with the product owners, we created the broad action-based categories of:
Search
Explore
Download
Learn
Finding inspo and creating mockups
We created a mood board with our product owners, and one source of inspo that caught our attention was the global navigation on Stripe.com. We liked the amount of context that could be added next to the navigation items through various layout options and the use of iconography.
I got to work creating mockups for the global navigation, and I oversaw a junior designer who created the new footer component.
Finishing up
We created various options for the global navigation components at desktop, tablet, and mobile viewport sizes. Partnering with our product owners, we also fine-tuned the language for each heading, link, and descriptive subheading.