Wayfinding

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Overview

USA TODAY is a fairly deep site, but too often users don’t drill down very far to access content. We wanted to see what we could do to improve that by creating a navigation structure that better supports and showcases our content.

Objective

We took this as an opportunity to take a holistic approach to the navigation, and see what we could do to solve for numerous issues.

We wanted to:

• Organize navigation in a more easily-scanned manner

• Incorporate a hamburger menu icon so that all platforms (desktop/tablet/mobile) have a common experience

• Promote newsletters

• Promote podcasts

• Break out sign-in status and subscribe to help customers realize whether or not they’re signed in

• Create a more elegant breaking news banner

• Surface relevant links on directories and subdirectories

My role

I collaborated with one of my direct reports on this project. My role was to ensure that we captured all the use cases and essentially art direct the project.

Outcome

We performed several rounds of user tests and the results were positive.

• 100% of users understood that the top nav layer was for the most important sections.

• 100% of users understood that they could find everything—including the search—via the hamburger.

• 100% of users noticed the secondary and tertiary navigation.