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IA Optimisation

Project Team: John Boyle, Kemal Gezer, Gianni Boffa

My Role: Research > UI Design > Validation

The initial Ladbrokes app, whilst successful, was showing signs of difficulty in accommodating a number of enhancements and features being introduced by business stakeholders. Rather than building to cater for this, the Ladbrokes UX team made the case that an entirely new information architecture should be designed to simplify the app as well as increasing its sustainability for future development.

Goal

Generate an optimum navigation and information architecture for the Ladbrokes mobile site/app.Generate an optimum navigation and information architecture for the Ladbrokes mobile site/app.

Approach:

  • Identify pain points within current stystem architecture.
  • Simplify the overall site architecture
  • Design a navigation that accomodates the completion of a variety of users’ key task

Heuristic Evaluation

As part of a team workshop, I was involved in the heuristic evaluation of the current system architecture/navigation. Some of the findings were as follows:

  • The menu is not glanceable; customers may find it difficult to scan for specific items as they are hidden in the menu. Particularly a bad experience for new customers as they may find it difficult to reach basic tasks.
  • The current (flat) navigation style is not in sync with our site architecture and as such, customers needs are not addressed.
  • Hamburger menu puts all functionality behind a menu, putting an immediate barrier between customers and most objectives.
  • My Bets button is lacking instant feedback when customers have active bets
  • Currently users have to dive into a menu to find cross see material – this could be acting as a potential barrier for customers

Interim Solutions:

In efforts to illustrate the potential impacts of this project, our first step was looking purely at the current navigation and how it could be optimised. This involved the exploration of grouping list items, reordering the list and exploring a “key items” area. I carried out all of the UI work at this stage and prepared an invision prototype for a usability testing session.

Research

Usability Testing – Session 1:

I supported a colleague in running a usability test with a representative sample of Ladbrokes customers to validate our initial design solutions. Through testing it was apparent that even subtle changes to the navigation were likely to greatly improve the overall experience for Ladbrokes customers – such results were shared with key business stakeholders who expressed their desire to be involved in the next steps of this project.

Stakeholder Card Sorting Workshop

Once we had realised how effective small changes could be, we brought in a number of PO’s for a card sorting workshop – understanding what areas a range of stakeholders felt were key in the architecture

These were then analysed and heat mapped to come up with some key trends.

Further Validation

I was involved in a further 2 rounds of usability testing related to the project to solidify validate the range of design solutions

Styleguide

In order to support our development team, I was involved in the generation of a number of PDF styleguides. These outlined a range of scenarios, button states, device orientations etc. and were subsequently used to aid the UAT team in their testing.

Interaction Design

Towards the latter stages of the UI design process – I carried out all of the interaction design involved within the new information architecture. Examples Here