Interior Define – Navigation & IA Redesign
APR 2018・UX RESEARCH・PROTOTYPING & TESTING・UI DESIGN
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Interior Define is a direct-to-consumer startup that specializes in customizable sofas and other furniture.
The company’s first major UX project was a redesign of the site's information architecture (IA), including top and bottom navigation, and menus.
The existing IA (above) suffered from vague naming, overstuffed categories, and buried some of the most important revenue-driving pages
As lead designer on the project, I aimed to:
↳ Better showcase product categories,
↳ Reduce clicks to common destinations, and
↳ Highlight the most important pages driving conversion (i.e. Locations, Book an appointment, and Complimentary Design Advice)
I prioritized the Locations and Book an appointment links in the redesign (above)
To inform a more intuitive information architecture (IA), I used in-person and online card sorting.
With the bones of a new IA in place from card sorting, I used tree testing to refine category naming, to test different iterations against each other, and to quantify their performance.
Customers grouped products by room, confused sectionals with sofas, and didn’t understand “Guideshops”
As my first project with Interior Define and the company’s first major redesign, I included a cross-functional team in the research to gain credibility and buy-in.
I presented my design process to senior leadership and the results of first-click testing to quantify and show the new navigation’s performance against the existing one.
I introduced more visual hierarchy within menus, and saw the simpler version (right) outperformed the rest
From testing, we learned that customers understood “Locations” better than “Visit us” or “Guideshops” (the previous naming), and it helped determine its placement to the right of the logo.
I grouped products into Living, Dining, & Bedroom to showcase collections on first glance
I added images to help customers differentiate between products (e.g. Sectionals vs Sofas)
I highlighted our complimentary design service to guide customers and generate inbound leads
On the footer, I added individual store locations and highlighted contact options
Measuring Results
When click-testing the high-fidelity designs, we saw a dramatic increase in the speed and success on the most important tasks (e.g. Find a store, look up the return policy, check their order status, etc), from 37% to 87% on mobile and 53% to 90% on desktop.
By prioritizing “Locations”, we saw a ~600-900% increase in traffic to individual Locations pages post-launch, with to a significant increase in appointments booked on the site. This was huge, as we know appointments typically converted around 60%+.
The project helped cement our design team’s research and testing process and earned us credibility and buy-in from senior leadership for future projects. The deck I presented is below: