Improving ecommerce navigation menus using UX Research
A poorly designed navigation menu can cause users to leave the website without finding what they were looking for and with a feeling of frustration. However, there are a number of guidelines we can follow to prevent the menu from becoming a problem and users from wasting their time.
Where to start the improvement process
The first step to start investigating what the main problems of a navigation menu might be is to conduct qualitative interviews with the internal departments of the company that have direct contact with customers. People working in the sales and customer service departments are most likely to have information about what the customers’ common problems are when interacting with the web menu.
Once the problem has been slightly narrowed down, the next step is to conduct qualitative usability tests with users to fully understand what their problems are.
Research techniques to improve navigation menus
To test whether a navigation menu is properly designed, the tree test can be used to check its usability. In this test, the menu is outlined and then a series of tasks are set to check whether users are able to easily find the information they are looking for on the website.
With this test we can find out if the answers are correct, what route has been used to reach the answer and how long it has taken to complete the task. It is very interesting because it allows us to have evidence of what are the problems of the information architecture and we can propose solutions to improve it.
Some problems that can be detected are:
- there are too many top-level product categories and users take wrong routes
- hierarchies overlap with each other
- subcategories do not have descriptive names
The next test that can be carried out to solve the problems that have been detected is card sorting. In this test we observe how the participants organise and group a series of cards labelled with the different sections of the website into categories. In this way it is possible to understand the mental models of the users of the website and adapt the menu to them.
After performing the card sorting, solutions can be proposed for the problems that have been discovered after the test. The first categories could be expanded to make the first click on the menu more intuitive and reduce the number of options that users have to consider in a first step, the hierarchies could be restructured to avoid confusion and the category names could be optimised to be more descriptive.
Implement, test, iterate
Once the improvements have been made, tree testing can be performed again with the new organisation and information architecture to ensure that the problems that were detected at the beginning have been solved. In this way the improvement in usability metrics can be measured.
The key to achieving the perfect ecommerce navigation menu is to evaluate through qualitative research and then make sure that the improvements have solved the issues that were raised.
The secret in UX always lies in researching users and understanding them perfectly in order to come up with the best solutions and offer a fantastic user experience.
This is a translation of the following article published in our corporate website:
