Navigation, Rebuilt: From Technical Maze to Intuitive Discovery
You can have every page someone needs and still lose them, because the way the site is organised only makes sense to the person who built it. The labels are internal, the groupings follow the database rather than the visitor, and finding anything takes a map. I rebuilt a navigation that had drifted into exactly that.
The maze
Over time, structure accretes. Sections get added where they were convenient to add, not where a visitor would look for them. The menu fills with terms that mean something to the team and nothing to a newcomer. Each addition was reasonable; the sum was a maze.
Rebuilding around the visitor
- Group by intent, not by system. Pages were re-sorted around what someone is actually trying to do, rather than which table they live in.
- Plain labels. Internal jargon out, words a first-time visitor would recognise in.
- A shallow path to everything. The things people want most are reachable in as few steps as possible, with the long tail kept findable but out of the way.
- One consistent model. The same structure on every device and every page, so once you learn it once, it holds.
The outcome
The same content, reorganised so it can actually be found. Discovery instead of hunting — a structure built for the person visiting rather than the system underneath.
