A Little Direction

I’m really very new to the world of moving towards a UX career though I’ve surprisingly found that I’ve done UX at times without even knowing it. I have become obsessed in the last week about it as it’s super exciting to me and I actually have a good opportunity at my current job to put it into practice and potentially start building my portfolio already. One of the branded websites needs a total redesign.

A few months ago my manager and I corralled the whole office to give feedback on the website. In a way we did some usability testing already. I kept all the notes from that research and have compiled a list of “problems” to solve with the redesign. I have then started white boarding with stickies the current navigation of all the products our company has to sell.

It has room for a ton of improvement as you might be able to tell. I’ve placed the other linking sections of the website off to the side for now as I’ll have to revisit how to integrate those into the overall map (I have ideas, but I’m trying to start basic).

My question is if my process so far is looking right or if I’m jumping too far ahead too soon, etc. I just want to make sure I’m on the right track and maybe know what would be the suggested next step. I haven’t done the card sorting technique with the products to see where people lean towards categorizing…so maybe that should be next?

Any advice at all is super helpful!

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Any kind of research / testing is always a great step. UX is not always so linear so you could be doing anything at anytime there’s no right or wrong. I like how you have problems to solve on the left hand, they seem mostly content / usability related. Just trying to understand the right hand side, as it looks like you’re card sorting and improving navigation. How do you think these two can work together? What are you aiming to do with left hand and right hand (sorry if I didn’t understand your Q well)

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Thank you Ari for taking the time to look at what I’m working on!

Looking at the left column is my reference, as I understand UX is to solve problems, to keeping in mind the problems I’m ultimately trying to solve. A lot of it being the content / usability of the site.

The right side could be card sorting? (super new to the terminology) but it is looking at the menu navigation on the website and how all the products are sorted into categories. It’s looking at the first problem from the left hand side for “Menu Navigation is not intuitive” or “too complex.” I would revisit the other problems afterwards, I’m thinking. The stickies I have up there now are how the menu is currently organized (the original feedback as from a couple months back and it was MUCH worse). I still think there’s lots of room for improvement.

I’m sort of thinking that maybe a site map is the first place to start, addressing that first problem, but maybe that’s jumping the gun.

Does this help a bit more?

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You’re not jumping the gun at all. It makes sense now that you are addressing the first problem. Card sorting is an activity that helps organise pages under categories in the information architecture. You can gather a group of people and ask them to join in and see what the consensus is. You’re doing great. This is pure UX keep it up

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Oh awesome! Good to know I’m on the right track. :slight_smile: Thank you again Ari for your time.

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No problem, glad I could help

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