Overview
The Opportunity
Zonar, a 23 year old fleet logisitics company, was looking to modernize their architecture infrastructure and create a new and more valuable web and mobile experience in the process.
The Hurdle
To accomplish this, Zonar needed to understand how it might combine, deprecate, and reorganize it’s in-market offerings into a new information architecture that could support the direction that the company was headed. The old information architecture (IA) was poorly organized, with excessive and duplicate offerings across categories and didn’t match users mental models. Because of this, the IA unintentionally created scenarios where a user would need to go to many disparate places across the platform to accomplish a single task.
The Solution
To create a better user experience, the design team partnered with the product managers and performed exercises that helped reorganize the existing IA into a “Jobs To Be Done” mental model that helped logically group reports, data, and workflows into meaningful categories that ensured users had what they needed to accomplish tasks within a view, or keep them only a click away.
Business impact: improve usability and navigability of new platform experience
Project Length: 1 month (spread across a year)
Team: Rich Robinson, Amanda Parkhurst, Richa Verma, Bobby Smith, Zonar PMs, Zonar Marketing Team
My Contributions: Drove and managed all stages of the effort, organized necessary workshops and artifacts to drive consensus, drove solutions based on test results, and translated requirements of the new IA to new design requirements for the sites existing navigation
“How might we reorganize our IA to better meet users needs?”
Research
A JTBD Framework
To ensure the new IA was aligned to a JTBD framework, we had an open card sort both internally and externally to name categories and sort items. Results were expansive and not overwhelmingly conclusive. As a result, we made some selections based on what strength the testing did provide and what qualitative information we could get from customers otherwise.
Card Sort
Test sets for original card sort
Inconclusive Results
Decision
We selected a new set of categories based on JTBD framework- Maintenance, Safety, Compliance, Performance, & Routing - as a starting point and started internal discussions to drive further hypothesis alignment.
Working Session
Work Session
Worked with Customer Care over 3 sessions to performan audit where recommendations for deprecation and combining of in-market reports led to a reduced number of items. Consolidated IA down from ~130 to ~70.
Mega Menu
Working sessions to consolidate and deprecate Mega Menu
Consolidation & Deprecation
Worked in Miro to drive consolidation efforts across Customer Care and Product Management.
Consolidation Exercise
Consolidation Detail
Completed consolidation Miro board
Worked in Miro to deprecate
Deprecation Details
Completed deprecation Miro board
Working Session
Work Session
Product Managers held working sessions to identify and sort use cases met by in-market, in production, new product, and unmet market needs for the new IA categories. UX then worked with Product Managers to align remaning consolidated reports to the use cases that had been sorted to new categories.
Sorting use cases via Miro board
Working sessions to sort in-market offerings into PMs use case matrix
Working sessions to sort in-market offerings in to new IA structure
Visualization of use cases and in-market offerings
But to make that usable, we needed to organize it into a more structured format:
Finalized Hypothesis
To finalize our hypothesis, we presented our thinking to marketing and product management to iterate and build consensus on the concepts and how they aligned with our value prop in the market and addressed any outlying concerns.
Artifact:
Initial hypothesis for future state IA
Testing
To test our future state hypothesis, we created a smaller near term version of the IA that aligned with our end of year road map commitments that we could test with.
Results
Finalized categories and laid foundation for conversation around the per-report UX within categories, as well as set stage for bringing in other aspects to the IA, like omni-channel marketing and sales touchpoints across the IA.