OVERVIEW

OVERVIEW

Macmillan Learning’s marketing sites (Instructor Catalog & Student Store) have been a source for higher ed instructors and students to browse and purchase digital and hardcopy materials for their courses.

ROLES

My Role: Product Designer
Research Partner: Shane Reed

PROBLEM 

User engagement with our hamburger menu had been really low, and once users interacted with it, the categorization, functionality, and layout of the menu made it hard for both users on the Catalogs and Student Store to find what they are looking for. Additionally, there were new supporting community sites that had been added in addition to, instead of an integrated experience.

TOOLS

• Figma

• Hotjar

• User Testing

PROBLEM DISCOVERY & VALIDATION

PROBLEM STATEMENTS

As an instructor, I want to be able to discover areas of interest using the instructor catalog but the current navigation system is hard to understand which makes me feel lost/confused. 

As a student, I want to be able to find the resources I’m looking for using the student store, but the current navigation system is hard to understand which makes me feel lost/confused.

IDENTIFYING KEY JOBS

After spending some time in Google Analytics, digging through paths and dropoffs, we were able to ID some hypothesized objectives for our instructors and students. My research partner and I launched surveys on our Instructor Catalog and Student Store, based on these assumptions, and got data on the ease of use for each reason for a user being on our site(s).

SOLUTION DISCOVERY & VALIDATION

RESTRUCTURING IA

There were so many key jobs to be done on the site that were being hidden by our hamburger menu. My biggest priority (somewhat ironically) was to improve the desktop experience. Unlike a majority of web traffic, our users are mostly desktop for both sites. In addition, I took some time to comb through pages and page types to find our more popular content. Using that, focusing on the jobs we identified during our survey, as well as some feedback from my stakeholders, I drafted new categorization. We tested new and existing navigation for instructors and students via usertesting.com.

RESULTS

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Redesigned navigation performed better than the current navigation for Catalog and Store.

• Update the “Contact Us & FAQ” page to allow instructors to locate the Contact Support button easier.

• Add Contact Support link in the footer to Catalog and Store.

• Update the Student Store Achieve landing page to be more informative.

• Make it easier to locate previously downloaded resources

• Instructor Catalog had an increase in perceived SEQ by 19% and task completion increased by 22%

• Student Store’s SEQ increase was insignificant for sample size (1%), but did have a task success completion of 12%

BACKLOG BENCH WARMER

Due to unforeseen projects taking precedent, this project awaits development in the backlog for our higher-ed stores

A SECOND CHANCE FOR HS

The good news is we were able to implement our learning (adapted) for our new K-12 store which you can view live here.