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 use cases.

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 co-designed this project with one of my direct reports. I also provided guidance on how best to user test the designs.

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.