Restructuring the information architecture and navigation of the ownership space to better fit customer expectations

Gathering Metrics, Best Practices, and User Data

Many of the major pain points users face in the own space relate to the information architecture of the site and our navigation system. We dove into the data, finding where users are getting lost and what disconnects ecist. and the reasons our users come to the own and support sites. We also utilized Baymard to find relevent industry standards.

Competitors & Comparators

There are many styles of navigation across automotive sites and across different industries. We looked at the unauthenticated and authenticated experiences on mobile devices and desktop of 4 higher end vehicle competitors, 6 direct vehicle competitors, and 9 comparators from different industries. This exercise revealed patterns we could utilize and issues we could avoid.

Uncovering the Mental Model

One unique issue we needed to address was the vast amount of items users need to find within the own space. Everything from tracking an order, to paying a car loan, to scheduling an oil change needs to be accessed from own. We conducted an open card sort in UserZoom and a closed card sort in dscout to see how users grouped roughly 40 of our offerings.

Fill in the Gaps with a Tree Test

The card sorts revealed a lot of usable information, but many key items did not have a clear category, such as recalls and software updates. We created a rough IA structure from the card sorts and conducted two tree tests - one with the current site structure and one with this card sort structure. We had 40 users on each test complete the same tasks. The card sort IA tested significantly better than our current site, reducing the number of difficult tasks, improving findabilitiy, and eliminating confusing terminologies.

Ideating from Research Takeaways

With all of this information, we began solutioning for these issues. We evaluated the global navigation system- it’s geared towards buyers, not owners. So, we began experimenting with a secondary navigation while in the ownership space as well as recommendations for changes to the global navigation.

Testing Our Designs

After collaborating with the design system team and going through peer design reviews, we wanted to test our designs. We identified 20 key products to include in our tests. To avoid user fatigue, we split these 20 tasks into 3 tests, each with 20 users. The results for most were incredibly promising, showing that there may be opportunity for both an enhancement to the global navigation while also utilizing a secondary navigation after a user signs in to their account. 3 rounds of iterative testing were conducted before the final.

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Proud moment- I developed a great system for organizing notes while watching the test videos!

The Final Designs

After rounds and rounds of iterating and testing, we finally uncovered the right direction- an enhanced global navigation and an added secondary navigation for authenticated users. With so many eyes on this project, we conducted a moderated test with 6 participants on the final designs, which were incredibly well received.