I discovered the ideal organization of a travel site navigation via user testing. I had already done some reorganization based on my UX intuition and was checking my work against the user panel as well.

This brand was only one of our 7 brands, which had an extremely cluttered and cumbersome navigation. We had noticed in Crazy Egg that a lot of users were stumbling around the navigation and clicking on things that couldn’t be clicked.

Before:

Using multiple types of panel user testing, I had users organize and find data in these menus to find common groupings and pain points. We found that a majority of users couldn’t find anything in the menus.

The tree test involved asking the user where they would ideally look for certain patterns (this was an A/B ordered test, to ensure I wasn’t “leading” the user from an earlier task).

One of the more validating tests was the menu-grouping and labeling task. We were able to see a feed and consistent organization of many items.

We had done user testing internally to feel out what concerns the sales, marketing, and product teams might have in regard to this, since they are one set of our users. It was great to be able to back up our changes with data from the end users as well. Overall the suggested changes to the platform were well-accepted, and led the company to move forward with a platform consolidation on one of the more successful platforms and navigations, which is currently ongoing.

Home page design after navigation improvements (including search widget):

Eventually the whole platform will be “sunset” and we will consolidate platforms towards our merged business, in part thanks to this research. All products related to Stays will eventually be combined into a single Stays experience.