Client
1stDibs
Role
Lead Product Designer
Year
2024
When the seller platform was first created in 2014, the site's navigation had to accommodate only a handful of features. The platform has since evolved, now supporting 10+ distinct features and their sub pages. Due to the horizontal layout of the existing navigation bar, we were quickly running out of space for new pages and features.
We saw an opportunity to create a more scalable solution for future pages as well as clean up the Information Architecture to improve the overall usability of the platform.
As part of the research phase for this project, I conducted a detailed competitive analysis of vertical side navigation (side nav) patterns across SaaS products. Key insights included trends toward collapsible and context-aware menus, the strategic grouping of features, and the importance of maintaining visibility for primary actions
Because most of the existing page layouts were done with a top nav bar, I proposed initially releasing a collapsed side bar to ease the transition.
User can then expand side nav to see all items. The tradeoff with this design however is that subpage navigation is a tad hidden which might discourage views to these pages.
After collecting feedback from stakeholders, we decided that the collapsed side bar might be too much of a risk for lowering views on sub pages. I initially resisted designing for a full side nav bar knowing that doing so would require a lot of eng work to reconfigure every existing page. In order to scope the potential changes, I went ahead and did a responsive audit of all pages and mocked up what potential design changes might be.
Once I was able to confirm with engineers that the scope of having to adjust page layouts and responsiveness was feasible, I finalized the next round of designs.
We conducted a series of usability sessions with sellers across different verticals (Vintage Furniture, Art, Jewelry) and geographies (NYC, London, Denmark). The goal of the study was to evaluate the current horizontal nav bar usability to set a base line to compare to the new vertical nav bar. We had participants perform a series of simple tasks such as navigating frequently used pages as well as hard to find subpages.
The results of the study found that the most sellers were able to navigate to pages in their normal workflow as well as slight improvements to navigating to more hidden pages. Other things we learned:
• Although the pages under the account dropdown were moved to the side nav bar, some sellers went to the existing account location to find pages by habit. In the updated design we moved the account into the bottom left of the side bar to prevent confusion upon rollout.
• Sellers generally do not use the homepage to navigate to other pages and instead go straight to the top nav bar. We saw this is as an opportunity to improve the homepage later on.
I worked with engineers to design, implement, and QA the new side nav bar across all pages in platform. This process involved making layout tweaks to all existing pages to accommodate the new design.
Made with Love Dennis Kim © 2024
