Improve SUS scores 75% with a nav redesign

Problem

Liferay expanded its product suite and was facing challenges with in feature adoption, poor usability in the navigation was a significant factor. This feature was a key part of the company’s product-led growth strategy.

Role

As Product Design lead, I collaborated with the Technical lead and PM to develop a strategy, ideating in tight feedback loops through execution. I consulted with Product Designers while building requirements and coached them through applying improvements in specific platform areas.

Contributions

Information Architecture
Wireframing
User Research
Product Strategy
Interaction Design
Usability Testing
Prototyping
Quality Assurance

Impact

Task Success Rate45^﹪

Reduced guesswork and clicks

System Usability Scale75^﹪

Significantly more user-friendly

Commerce Adoption220^﹪

YoY growth of our ecommerce features

Process

Improving our understanding of the user was a critical first step.

I interviewed a variety of users, summarized the qualitative data, and facilitated ideation sessions.

One outcome was an updated map of where the different user groups did most of their work.

A graphic showing two diagrams of the mental model for navigation

Iterations

I created close to 2 dozen experiments at various fidelities, including plenty of Figma spaghetti.

This is a selection of a few that best related to the final product.

Because this impacted so many teams, I had to balance consensus making with getting things done. I found it useful to go wide, then test and iterate.

Experimenting with a multi-layer sidebar — testing revealed no improvement in task success.

An experiment using theme as a signal to users what area of the product they are in.

A quick foray into a horizontal navbar — while this iteration had lots of issues, it led to a lot more ideas.

An idea for a quick site-switcher to make it easier for users to switch between sites.

One of the first versions of the mega menu — testing this idea helped me sell it to the team.

Outcomes & Learnings

Shipping a feature of this magnitude at enterprise scale gave me a new appreciation for the value of effective change management.

One difficult tradeoff in the moment was cutting a custom menu builder and instead implementing a way for site admins to enable the new nav at the pace of their organization.