Navigation Test Drive
Overview
By overlaying a custom navigation component on top of an iframe of an existing site, you could do content and information architecture prototyping quickly and easily on a live site by editing the navigation and URLs. Like test driving a new car, you’d instead be able to test “drive” a new navigation.
It’s extremely useful for designers to be able to try out new navigation models on an existing site without any coding or managing content.
Results
Gathering feedback
We were curious to know how our audience (UX researchers, designers, and content strategists) would respond to this concept. To gauge their interest, we quickly set up a pseudo-site to look like a SaaS product page.
The feedback:
- “Yeah, sounds like a cool idea. I was curious. I like the idea of being able to overlay a new navigation and see how it might work…“
- “Generally I dig the idea of doing a tree test in context of the actual site.”
- “We’re planning to set up a tree test and have them and users do it, but something like this would provide richer data because we’d capture insights about the interface challenges that might also hinder someone finding a page.”
- “Clients get stuck in their thinking, and this is an interesting, incremental way to introduce new ideas.”
The navigation template tool
The template includes instructions on getting started and requires no knowledge of code whatsoever. Simply plug in your content and enjoy that new nav smell.
Tools used
- USWDS
- GitHub
- Jekyll
Reflection
Unlike most of our projects that contained a problem-solution approach, this project took an idea that we believed could help our intended audiences and experimented with it. Working on this project gave us the opportunity to continue creating reusable templates for our in-house team at Bixal.
