How do you create a taxonomy for a large sporting goods manufacturer with over 20 sports, keeping audience engaged and purchasing custom products, with competing tasks and multiple user interests?
Wilson needed to redesign it’s site. The architecture was all over the place, and their primary revenue driver online was buried 3 levels down. The biggest challenge here was how to prioritize the taxonomy and create a simple navigation. There were several sports and each needed its own experience. However, a hub and spoke navigation from a top level page was not going to be ideal to drive traffic.
DISCOVERY:
Research on the users had been done prior to my tenure, so we had use cases and understanding of the users. The business made the most online money from customization, so we needed to make the customization front and center. Also, we needed to stylistically and functionally make all the pages and data consistent.
The content was another challenge. In the previous iteration, content, was segregated to its own section. We needed to create a way to sprinkle content throughout, at the same time integrating the story to promote engagement.
IDEATION:
Before we could address architecture, we needed to do some task mapping. We created concept maps for each user type based on the goals they would be doing on the site. We used that to create a content map for all the pages.
We tried several architectures, The key was to level up the customized products and the additional content. The new solution features a mega nav with a visual highlighted component with the sports under “shop” , “explore” contains content and the “custom” tab contains the ability to create custom products, The top level landing pages then became very visual tiles to encourage engagement.
SOLUTION:
We organized the top level sports at the top level, while also bringing the shop and customize sections up to the top level. We also organized the top level sports to give them a priority that matched the business, as well as integrating some visual space into the navigation.
FINAL PRODUCT:
What I did:
UX Team Leadership, Content Strategy, Global Information Architecture
