The dashboard at WegoWise had become a dumping ground for links to miscellaneous pages as the site continued to grow and the result was an unwieldy, long navigation menu with lots of unrelated links sitting side-by-side.

To solve this, I created a multi-stage process to ensure that the information architecture changes that I implemented were thoroughly verified via user testing at various stages.

Card sorting

The first stage was to print out every screen of the app onto a card and get groups of users to put them into buckets. Post-its were used to create the buckets and the cards were placed in lists underneath.

During the exercise, I conducted interviews to understand the reasoning behind the various bucket types and took photos of the arrangement to be able to look through them later and check for overlaps.

Exposing common patterns

A few common patterns emerged, these were plotted into a tree diagram to make sense of the findings and some definitive category names were chosen.

Verifying the new structure

In the next stage, users were asked to move cards into the categories that we had defined in the previous step. For this stage we used Trello cards and lists and the idea was to verify that the categories we had defined made sense to a wider audience.

Testing the interface

In the final stage of testing (before starting development), users clicked around interactive prototypes (created in Sketch and InVision) to see if they arrived at the desired destinations in the expected number of clicks.