COLLABORATION, TESTING, & FEEDBACK

Awardco Navigation Refresh

The Problem

Clients find Awardco confusing to navigate which makes it difficult for them to find what they are looking for.

Project Summary

As Awardco’s full-time intern, I was assigned to the Navigation Refresh project, collaborating with a team of two students from the local university and Brett Bertola, a senior designer. The objective was to enhance the current platform’s navigation, focusing on making it intuitive, scalable and beautiful. We conducted user interviews, created both low- and high-fidelity wireframes, carried out usability testing, and maintained frequent collaboration with each other.

Through continuous feedback and clear communication, we successfully tested and validated three distinct ideas, combining them into a final solution presented to Awardco’s product leadership. Our designs were well-received and have since served as a crucial reference point in the 2024 redesign of Awardco’s navigation.

Previous Navigation

Awardco's current main navigation is along the top left side.

The Admin section of the platform has navigation components that are also along the top and left side.

My Process

Discovery: Understanding the Problem

To begin, we documented in Figjam what seemed to be working well with the navigation, what wasn’t, and sought to understand it. With my previous position at Awardco in Client Support, I was able to bring a deeper perspective of the problem to the group. Together, we concluded that overall the current navigation was too spread out and felt disorganized.

We also conducted an in-depth interview with ShaNae, an implementation manager at Awardco. From her perspective, we discovered that Admins, our users that manage the Awardco platform, were especially confused when setting up and managing their platform for themselves.

Admin users are confused when trying to set up and manage the platform for themselves. They are taught in implementation to AVOID certain pages.

Choosing a Direction

Based on our research, we decided to focus our efforts on enhancing the navigation specifically for the Admin user. We did the Crazy 8's exercise to quickly iterate on some initial solutions. This helped us realize we each had distinct ideas that should be explored further. At this point, we decided to work independently and come together at a later time.

Concept sketch created from the Crazy 8 exercise. The side nav was the idea that stood out most to me.

Wireframing

After our designs on paper, we went straight to high-fidelity designs. I chose to move the navigation to the left side, create a more organized Settings landing page, and add a search bar.

Moderated Usability Testing

After my initial set of high-fidelity iterations, we set up quick moderated usability tests with three different Awardco admin users. While a third-party was conducting the tests for us, we were able to watch remotely and listen to the feedback live. It was a little difficult to hear my design get critiqued and questioned but from their feedback, I realized my designs had too much white space, the visual hierarchy was poor, and was still difficult to navigate. This experience taught me to embrace feedback and to realize that it's ultimately not about me but the user and their needs.

Iterations

Based on the feedback from our testing, I further iterated on my designs. I added icons to the left side nav bar, anchored the search bar to the top right corner, and improved the overall visual hierarchy. My teammates, Zac & Lauren, also iterated on their designs and we decided to each create a unmoderated usability study to gain further insights.

Second round of iterations based on testing feedback.

Unmoderated Usability Testing Using Maze

Out of the 29 participants from our usability test, 89% of them prefer to have icons connected to the navigation menu

In my test, I wanted three questions answered:

Is the left side navigation intuitive?
Can users easily navigate from the main homepage to a specific Settings page?
Do people prefer to have icons connected to the navigation?

From the results of my testing, I learned:

96% of users found the navigation intuitive, and the heat map confirmed they clicked on the right items.
All participants successfully navigated to the settings page, with positive feedback.
89% prefer having icons connected to the navigation menu.

Final Collaboration

After our final usability testing, our team came together and discussed our individual results and findings. We discovered that it would be best to combine elements from each of our designs for the final design proposal.

The final design needed to include:

a search bar
icons in the nav menus
descriptions, of settings page
left navigation

We communicated which aspects of the prototype we would create and combined our designs.

Takeaways & Highlights

This project taught me the importance of frequently using usability testing to gain feedback during the creative process. It also taught me how to better communicate with my team members, and that it’s okay to take time to explore ideas separately, and to allow others to accomplish task that are more suited to their skill set.

Final Designs