Discovery

I began the discovery phase with ethnographic research. A listening tour, where I connected with stakeholders from Product, Development and the Business to better understand the current state of navigation — user personas, KPIs, next-page-flow, seasonality, sitemap, A/B test capabilities and our goals.

After gaining a cohesive understanding of the problem I began an end-to-end heuristic review of our navigation UX. Supplementing my own findings with user testing verbatims and reviews it was clear that site navigation didn’t match up well with the user’s mental map for product categorization.

Competitive analysis

Looking at direct competitors, eCommerce leaders and aspirational brand’s site structure it was clear there was a lot of opportunity to simplifiy and improve wayfinding, better highlight sales and new product offerings, and innovate a little within our problem space.

Supplementing my own research with findings from Baymard Institute’s latest eCommerce report, I presented the results of my discovery to the stakeholder group with the recommendation that among other things, we consolidate the learn and shop paths — treated as distinct personas — to better reflect how customers shop.