Navigation Design Sprint

I led a project to re-design the Capital One Investing authenticated (logged-in experience) information architecture, interaction design and styling.

The Problem was the web site had grown organically over time and soon reflected "Conway's Law." It reflected more of how our organization was structured and how it thought about our business rather than how real customers would approach accomplishing tasks and finding content.

The process

I led a 3-day workshop where a small group of 4 (two designers, two product managers, and a data analyst) had intense working sessions. We shared out the results at the end of each day and received feedback from key stakeholders. This group was purposefully small so that we would efficiently be able to produce navigational prototypes based on information architecture principles.

day 1-3

We first reviewed as much data as we could get our hands on, including how people typically navigate on our site, industry reports, a card sorting study and customer feedback from a simple prototype I placed on usertesting.com that tested basic tasks with our existing taxonomy. We sifted through feedback and themed the results.

We created hypotheses to test our learnings:

We believe we can improve findability by improving labeling to match the mental models of our customers.

We believe we can improve our customer’s efficiency by disambiguating top of mind tasks from marketing content.

DAY 4-6

The following week we spent half-days reviewing feedback from the first prototypes and quickly iterated on them both so that we test variations on terms. With the second round of feedback, we felt comfortable consolidating into one solid prototype.

Our findings helped us determine what customers thought of as their account information.

RESULTS

The end result was drastically different than our current experience. We kept the top navigation true to the customer's core needs, and relegated many links that were placed within the navigation for business reasons to the footer area. We also created a new area for centralized messages and profile settings.

After the sprint, I also created two mobile prototypes for usability testing to determine an interaction design paradigm. I created the prototypes, the test protocol and facilitated an unpacking session with participation from product, engineering and design.

Hypotheses: