Global
Navigation
Project goal:
The project aimed to make OLX navigation more fluid and modern, ensuring that users find what they need on our platform. In this project we validate:
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Added shortcuts, generating redundancy, making it easier for the user to find important items.
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Show content to inspire and educate sellers and buyers, in a clear, objective and personalized way in the divided home.
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Including featured items (eg: campaigns) in the category pick list can make ads easier to find.
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Providing a unified communications hub makes it easy to manage and view updates..
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Provide a feature to filter/segment messages for easier findability.
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Contextually offering paid services would increase adoption
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Structure of contextualized shortcuts facilitates access to internal navigation areas
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The account showcase will facilitate user access to internal navigation areas
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Unifying all monetary transaction elements (OLX Pay, cards, payment history) at the same navigation level makes sense in the users' mental model
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Our user is able to differentiate what the OLX Pay service is from what he spent on the platform
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Having a personal store on the OLX platform is a desire for users
Design System
Information Architecture
UX Research
UX Strategy
Design management
Why global navigation?
OLX's main navigation structures had not been planned to keep up with the evolution of the product and the increasing inclusion of functionalities, causing inconsistencies in nomenclature and hierarchy between platforms, in addition to distortions in navigation.
The project consisted of redesigning the platform's global navigation architecture considering the users' mental model and the main business objectives.
We focus on having a simple, fluid, consistent and scalable navigation model that follows product evolutions and ensures that the user finds what he needs on the platform.
Main challenges
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Increasing number of items on the menu
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Coexistence of features exclusively from professional OLX profiles with horizontal features, which confused the user
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Coexistence of payment features with horizontal features
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Discovery flow hampered by difficult navigation between categories
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Discovery flow hampered by the need to be at Home to do textual searches.
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Difficulty updating Header in all instances when there was a new version.
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Inconsistencies of cross-platform navigation models
Methodology
Understanding the problem
After identifying the need to work on a new OLX navigation proposal, we looked at the research we already had on the subject. In this way, we have already started our discovery with the mapped pains of other surveys.
We use buyer and seller journeys to pinpoint key pain points. Then, in a forum with designers, we chose the most relevant pains that we should address in our proposals.
Considering that we were going to work with new navigation flows and with the objective of standardizing the experience between platforms, we got together to map how the sitemaps and flows of each of the platforms (Web, Msite, iOS and Android) were. With this mapping alone, we have already found several inconsistencies that we will deal with in our future proposals. At the same time that we looked at the architecture, we also studied term inconsistencies across platforms. In the taxonomy study, we could clearly see the difference in the navigation flow between platforms, as people cannot find the same item in the same place.
We also found inconsistencies in the naming of items, which also impairs findability and conveys less professionalism and confidence on the part of the company..
Ideation
After understanding the scenario we are in, we go through the moment of ideation. Together with a team of designers, we devised a new navigation proposal, initially focusing on building the ideal navigation sitemap.
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We held several ideation workshops to make the screens related to the new sitemap that we built tangible so that we could have a direction to test with our users.
We focused on being mobile first because we understand that the screen size restriction could be a problem considering the new architecture we were proposing, in addition to being a direction from OLX.
With the evolution of the layouts, we made critiques with the OLX teams that would be affected by the new navigation proposal. In this way, everyone participated in the creation process, indicating on post-its the main risks for the project, data and facts that could influence the proposal and ideas to iterate the prototype.
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We did 2 critiques on the same models, one incremental to the other. After the second critique, we improved our prototype and took it to user validation
Testing with users
We ran 2 qualitative tests with users that aimed to validate our assumptions about the new navigation.
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Purpose of the first test:
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As a whole, the project aims to make our navigation more fluid, ensuring that users find what they need on our platform.
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From the point of view of UX writing, it also intends to make this navigation consistent across platforms and make communication clearer, concise, useful and aligned with the voice and tones of OLX.
Purpose of the second test::
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Test OLX's new navigation proposal with users, also validating new product concepts.
Refine
Thinking about OLX's vision of the future, we also considered other issues that would impact the company in the refinement, such as Platformization. After our more forward-looking studies, we broke down deliveries and focused on what we could implement in the first wave of shipping.
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