My Role
UI/UX Project Lead
I designed the global navigation & strategy team, leading a team of six members
Design Execution & Validation
Leadership & Coordination
Experience Strategy & Vision
Planning & Scope Definition
Defining The Problem
Navigation & Taxonomical structure
Navigation affects traffic and findability to State Farm products. With the current hamburger menu, research states we need to redesign a navigational system to expose products and services. Incorporating a Mega Menu with rollover to avoid the bad connotation with dropdowns is best practice according to usability studies
Recommendations:
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Completely separating Banking from Finances. This will help expose bank as a separate tower and increase its findability to customers.
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Dividing Finances into Banking and Investments, alleviates confusion, and provides lucid direction to customers, and beneficial to SEO.
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Expose products in the top navigation and get away from the hamburger menu.
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Incorporate second level navigation for local pages.
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Utilizing breadcrumbs for the hierarchal arranged pages.
Current
State Issues
In 2013, Statefarm commissioned an external vendor to design a solution for both visual and information architecture components. During the time of its release, it was very successful. But over the years, this solution has become out-dated and Statefarm has fallen behind competitors in the digital space.
Due to the redesign effort for the Statefarm web domain, I was assigned to this project as the leading information architect. And this is my perspective and design strategy on what my team and I proposed.
The
Overview
With the lack of consistent experiences within the current environment, we want to restructure the State Farm web domain as a Self Services Ecosystem to help create interdependent relationships for our customers. Our goal is to stop looking at individuals or single applications, but rather the global services & architecture we provide to our customers and create a seamless experience with consistent components and behaviors.
The
Process
We conducted workshops with Product Owners, UX Designers, Researchers, Analytics & SEO team to complete an analysis of the current state. We compiled the findings into a SWOT analysis document & compared it to the future proposed architecture. We ended up with a solid understanding of customer feedback, and SEO suggestions to help improve the overall experience. During our workshop, we enhanced the following: 1. Global Navigation, 2. Content Audit, 3. Asia Templated System (ATS), 4. ASIA Ecosystem Customer Journey & 5. Self Service Ecosystem.
IA Strategies & Recommendations
IA
Sitemap & Structure
The primary problems with the current website involve organization schemes, taxonomical labeling, navigation, and searching. The following strategies and recommendations are aimed at providing solutions to the State Farm Web Domain.
Recommendations:
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After the Tree Testing, for a few customers, it took some thinking process for them to find loans under banking. So, we suggest changing Banking to “Banking & Loans.
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Consider moving the discount programs under vehicle insurance to make it more easily accessible. If it only applies to cars, clearly label it “car insurance discounts.
Global
Footer
Product Specific Navigation area to navigate the various options and pages within a product line. This Nav area should be used on all pages within a category.
