NatGeo Expeditions

Information Architecture, UX Research

The Pitch

How can we help users find their dream vacation?

The Objective

Redesign this travel website's primary & secondary navigation with changes backed by user data.

The Problem

Present card sorting data visually to justify change recommendations to stakeholders.

The Solution

A new, intuitive, user-tested navigation sitemap.

Key Takeaway:How to translate 400+ data points into visual trends for stakeholders.

Tools used:Sketch, xSort, draw.io, Pen-and-Paper

Timeline/Team: 2-week sprint. Solo Project.

46

NAVIGATION CATEGORIES- Renamed ambiguous titles as per user feedback
- Created new, intuitive, user-tested sitemap

10

USER TESTS- Used both open and closed card sorting
- Refined primary categories over two iterations

410

DATA POINTS- Identified user trends with Excel formulas
- Presented visual dendograms & color clusters

41

10

410

SECONDARY NAVIGATION CATEGORIES
- Renamed ambiguous titles based on user feedback
- Created new, intuitive, user-tested sitemap

USER TESTS
- Used both open and closed card sorting
- Refined primary categories over two iterations

DATA POINTS
- Identified user-sorted trends through Excel formulas
- Presented visual dendograms & color clusters

Project Deliverables

Expeditions is a National Geographic brand off-shoot, allowing travellers the opportunity to visit some of the world’s most beautiful places, as seen in the world’s most beautiful magazine.
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My task was to improve the often-confusing and imbalanced sitemap navigation, and to make it as beautiful as the rest of their website so users could more easily discover their dream vacation.

Card Sorting

Starting with analog open card sorting, users were encouraged to come up with their own primary navigation titles for all website categories, as well as revise names for clarity.

This provided aggregated ideas for new titles that could be tested further in digital closed card sorting, which refined the results and categories even more.

Data Analysis

Using Excel formulas and dendrograms that processed the 410 data points from card sorting, I was able to identify which newly-written primary navigation titles resonated with users, along with aggregated trend reports of what secondary navigation categories belonged in each, which could be presented to stakeholders and easily understood:

The Final Result

This is an illustration comparing the original website's sitemap (which was imbalanced and overly complicated with sub-categories), with the new changes based on user feedback (which balances out the categories and re-names ambiguous titles).

While the original sitemap had users frequently confused, frustrated and lost, all test users in the new sitemap found it intuitive, and all test users sorted and placed each navigation category consistently in the same section with an average 76% correlation.

Read more about this process, along with the website’s heuristic analysis and user flow on Medium.

Want to work together?

If you like what you see and want to work together, get in touch!

richard.l.lam@gmail.com

Project 2

Web Design

Project Overview

My Contributions

Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia. It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth.
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Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia. It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth.
‍
Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean.

Webflow

Web Designer

Apr 2015 — Mar 2016