In 2021, Duo’s web team undertook a complete overhaul of the navigation and information architecture for duo.com. The project sought to improve findability of content, optimize for a mobile-first experience and make IA maintenance easy.
Re-imagining a website’s information architecture is a massive effort. Duo’s web team recognized this challenge, and designers, strategists and web developers sketched potential solutions together, optimizing the eventual solution for user experience, technical practicality and ease of maintenance.
The project progressed quickly from casual sketching to low-fi wireframes. This informal iteration phase allowed the team to let go of design perfection and embrace the process of thinking like a user.
Creating and maintaining a fully functional prototype early on made design and user research easy. Viewing design changes in real time allowed the team to troubleshoot any issues and work with an actual user experience, rather than static mockups.
The team set goals for the updated navigation and tested with user research specialists. Real users were observed performing key tasks using a fully functional prototype, and observations were recorded and used to optimize the navigation experience.
Based on user research, the team mapped a variety of user journeys, each focused on solving key problems. Potential stumbling points were identified, allowing the team to better direct user behavior in a positive way.
Thanks to immersive user research, iterative design and close team collaboration, the Duo web team created a goal-oriented, user-centric mega-menu. The new design increased transparency wit customers, showcased more of the site’s helpful content and made it easier for users to complete key tasks.
As the project owner, led a team of writers, designers and developers through iteration, design, user testing, launch and post-launch change management.
Owned content strategy and information architecture the new navigation and worked with developers to determine the best way to maintain the new design in Duo’s content management system.