Project summary

Project details

Research and discovery

• Benchmark analysis: Evaluated the top-level navigation from a UX/UI and content structure perspective of various other e-commerce websites which have a similar level of complexity and diversity in their offering (such as John Lewis, Etsy, Marks and Spencer, Next, Oliver Bonas, ASOS, IKEA). This helped us identify and define problem statements and hypotheses for our own top navigation. Some of the learnings were:
  • Long lists are in alphabetical order.
  • Visuals such as thumbnails help to more easily understand the content
  • Curated collections are visually distinct to make clear the difference in content.
• New research: Analysed together with a team member from Kin+Carta/Valtech our current top-level navigation experience to determine both low and high-effort improvements.
  • View analysis

Design process

Phasing experiments

Phase 1: Hick’s Law principles

Phase 2: Content optimisation

Phase 3: Layout and interaction experimentation

Results and impact

Improved navigation and content discoverability: once this work is launched, we anticipate that customers will be able to more easily browse through all that NOTHS has to offer and discover products they would like to purchase.

Reflections and next steps

Challenges and lessons learned

As navigation is really important for SEO performance, all proposed changes had to be checked with an external agency to make sure they don’t have a negative impact or are too detrimental. It was not so straightforward to find the balance between the changes needed for a better user experience and the limitations brought by SEO performance requirements.

Future improvements

Not all opportunities identified had been designed within these first three phases of work. Some changes for the next steps of this work I would like to see happen are:

• Having more visuals in the navigation (e.g. thumbnails with images instead of plain links).
• Making an even clearer distinction between Categories and Collections.