Product Ideas Pitch Portal
| Project Lifecycle Status | Planning |
| Product value score | 5 |
| Business Priority (Optional) | Engagement |
| Values | Pursuit of Truth, Accessibility, Public Service |
|
State your hypothesis, tying your project back to the impact it might have.
Implementing clear and intuitive navigation menus will streamline user navigation, leading to improved engagement and satisfaction. By providing easy access to desired content, users are more likely to spend time on the site, explore various sections, and return for future visits. This project supports business goals such as increasing audience engagement, retention, and overall site usability. |
|
|
Which metrics would you use to track the success of this project? We will use this as the foundation of our experiment design. (Optional)
|
|
|
What problem are we trying to solve for our communities with this experiment? How might it help us better serve them?
Without a clear and intuitive hamburger menu, users may struggle to find the information or features they need, leading to frustration and potentially causing them to abandon the site. By implementing a clear and intuitive hamburger menu, we might make it easier for audineces to explore different elements of our offerings, find the news and information they may be seeking, or perform other desired actions without having to guess or search extensively. |
|
|
Lay out the potential project steps to the best of your ability, including key teams that would need to be consulted. This is your best knowledge of the systems, tools and lift that would be required.
Define key areas of navigation and landing pages: Engage relevant stakeholders across departments to identify the key areas of navigation to test. Suggested considerations from team:
User research: Conduct user research (including analytics on current usage) to understand current navigation pain points and user preferences, both on our platforms and as a competitive audit with other platforms. Consider basic UX principals as a baseline where we have gaps. Data types: Search data on site Google search terms Data questions: Return visitors Journies - where do they originate Design navigation structure for iteration 1: Develop a clear and intuitive navigation hierarchy. Organize website content into logical categories and subcategories to align with the new navigation structure. Wireframing and prototyping: Create wireframes and prototypes to visualize the proposed navigation layout and gather feedback from stakeholders. Development and QA: Implement the designed navigation structure, ensuring compatibility with different devices and browsers. Conduct usability testing with real users to identify any navigation issues or usability concerns, making necessary adjustments and refinements based on user feedback. Launch and monitoring: Deploy the updated navigation menus on the live website and monitor key metrics to evaluate the impact of the changes on user experience and engagement. Continue to iterate based on the data we evaluate. |
|
| Effort (scale of 1-lowest to 4-highest) | 1 |
| Urgency (scale of 1-lowest to 4-highest) | 2 |
| Business Impact (scale of 1-lowest to 4-highest) | 3 |
| Cost (scale of 1-lowest to 4-highest) | 1 |
| Alignment with Values (scale of 1-lowest to 4-highest) | 3 |
@MacGregor Campbell gathering current analytics and looking at basic UX principles, such as jobs to be done and effectiveness of completing those jobs, is part of the user research. I have an exercise around this that I believe I previewed for you - that's the one I would envision us using as part of this process. Thank you for calling out that this is unclear in the project steps, I will update to call this out more specifically.
I think this might be about the order of things. We won't be making decisions by internal politics, and we will be making decisions in accordance with user needs. It might take a few iterations of our hamburger menu to get there, because how users are currently using the hamburger menu can only tell us so much. I do think defining which jobs or actions we are trying to drive will be helpful as we look at which areas of navigation we want to test.
I think these steps need to work a little bit in tandem, but we can change the ordering.
Re: hierarchy. While I don't want to lose sight of the hierarchy as we make changes, I agree it can be separated out as a future project.
And these suggested project steps are not meant to "insist" anything. They are merely starting points for conversation.
For project steps, before conducting user research, I would recommend a survey of available analytics and what they tel us about the current use of the hamburger nav.
While I would categorize "iterate on the hamburger nav" as low effort, I would very much NOT say "Design navigation structure: Develop a clear and intuitive navigation hierarchy. Organize website content into logical categories and subcategories to align with the new navigation structure." is low effort. Neither is it required to iterate on the hamburger nav. Recommend splitting these two tasks. Swapping out elements in the hamburger nav is easy to do and I suppose measurable, tho we'll need some baseline data. Past experience suggests re-architecting site hierarchy is orders of magnitude more complicated and even harder to measure.
If we insist that these tasks be intertwined, I would recommend having this not be a quick win. We have not adequately describe how the current nav is failing users. To do that, I would add a step to the project steps, before user research consisting of "map out and prioritize user jobs." We could then use that list to inform how to conduct user research, identify the specific ways users are failing to accomplish their goals and design solutions accordingly. Re-architecting the site hierarchy without such a list is likely to lead to design decisions that are determined by internal politics, not real user needs.