Mini Case Study
Nvidia Navigation
Why rework only the navigation? Nvidia's header is cluttered and hard to use. It's a project unto itself to redesign the way the navigation works, and it suffers from these main problems:
What are the most important business categories, and therefore the most important links?
Driven by data from an Investopedia article that analyzed Nvidia's sources of revenue, we can see exactly where Nvidia makes their money:
With the GPUs and Data Center categories accounting for a combined 86% of revenue, we clearly have our top 2 most important business categories, with Professional Visualiation coming in a very distant 3rd.
Ideally we'd employ user research and other metrics that I don't have access to in order to dertermine the other most important links, but for the purposes of this exercise we can basically assign equal importance to all other categories in the absence of real data.
Using the laws of UX by John Yablonski, we can see how some of them apply to the header, and how they can be used to make the new design better.
Hick's Law: The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.
Following Hick's Law, we'll reduce the overall amount of... well, everything. From the clicks it takes to get to products, to the total number of categories and links.
Occam's Razor: Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
Following Occam's Razor, we'll decide which categories and links make the most sense to keep by using a mixture of common sense and data. I don't have Nvidia's actual data for what pages are most visited on their website, but if I did that's what we'd use to help make our decisions.
Serial Position Effect: Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.
All throughout, the order of the links for each category and subcategory will be driven by the serial position effect - most important links toward the beginning and end, everything of lesser importance in the middle of a list.
Here's the final working version of the reorganized main navigation. It's now way quicker and easier to find what's most important to Nvidia, their 2 best money-making product categories of GPUs and Data Centers. If a user is unsure of where the link they're looking for resides, they'll be sure to find it under All Products, which does contain a link to every product that Nvidia offers. We only duplicated a link or category where it made sense - for example there are Data Center GPUs, so those links will appear under GPUs, Data Center & Cloud, as well as the All Products menu.
I ended up with:
(Please view on a larger screen to see the desktop version.)