Data-driven navigation for improved user experience

February 4, 2025 Lucy Aspinall

Do you know where your website users are looking for the information they need to buy into your product or service?

If there’s a disconnect between how you’re structuring the information on your website and where your prospective customers are looking for it, you might be seeing higher drop-off rates than you’d expect on what you deem to be the key pages on your site.

The impact? Less time on site, an audience that doesn’t engage and fewer conversions.

When clients come to us facing these sorts of issues we want to understand the decisions behind how their site is structured and why they’ve chosen that hierarchy or language within their navigation or site maps. Often the answers we receive don’t involve the end user – but should it?

Our response would be a resounding yes.

Carrying out user research to ascertain the needs of your users and create clear direction and structure on your website will save your users and teams time and stress. Creating site maps and navigation that are data-driven and user-verified not only means you get it right the first time, but you will increase the independence of your users to find their way to exactly where they need to be.

About site maps and navigation

The navigation is often the first thing people see when they land on your website, and the first place they go in order to be guided through their decision-making process. This makes the navigation one of the hardest working aspects of your site.

With 94% of users agreeing that easy navigation is the most useful website feature (Clutch) it’s clear that the site map and navigation are powerful tools with the ability to create positive user experiences and encourage exploration of your site. Happier users are likely to spend more time on site and less likely to bounce.

When we talk about navigation, we don’t only mean in the traditional sense of a series of links running across the top of your page (or a toolbar running along the bottom of your screen), but how you guide a user from one end of a journey to the other. You should consider all forms of navigation including your various calls to action.

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Navigation and site maps that support your audience

Your site navigation doesn’t have to be complicated, but it is worth investing the time and effort into ensuring it is suitable for your target audience. This way not only are you guiding customers through their journey but, by supporting them to find the information they need as quickly and as easily as possible, you are allowing them to complete a task and fully comprehend your business offering in as short a time as possible. Win win, right?

With that in mind here are a few quick tips to make sure your navigation is more of a help than a hindrance:

Use high information scents such as descriptive labels for link text, supporting images or visual cues and content previews.
Support user understanding through information labels so they can see, at first glance, what is available on the website.
Keep your primary navigation consistent to ensure users can trace their steps back through their journey – at no point should you be replacing your navigation when a user clicks through to a new section.
Keep it short and sweet to avoid overwhelming users with too many options from a cluttered screen. Reducing the navigation to a scannable amount of links means that you will make your users comfortable and provide a clearer guide towards action.
Use hamburgers only if additional navigation is needed, but don’t duplicate links.
Make key journeys more prominent by making sure calls to action stand out, whether that's a ‘Book now’, ‘Get in touch’ or ‘Next’ button on a form. When looking at more conversion based actions consider supporting the call to action with additional information, whether that's a marketing message or statistic to catch and engage the users attention.
Organise with your user in mind – what do they want to do first or need to know first before moving forward? Make sure that action is the first link in your navigation to save your users having to scan the navigation to look for it.
Keep key information above the fold (what users can see without needing to scroll). In many cases, users don’t scroll past the landing section. Don’t miss out on opportunities to encourage prospects to engage with you by hiding key information or calls to action towards the bottom of the page.
Test new navigations before launching via tree testing to see whether the new structure and labelling of your site guides your users properly, or whether they end up getting lost.

The crux of ensuring your navigation is working hard enough for you comes down to making sure it’s working for your users. How do we make sure this happens? It all comes down to user research.

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Incorporating user research to support navigation design

As UX/UI specialists our primary focus will be on how well digital products can meet the needs of the user. Developing a thorough understanding of who your audience is and how they use your site to get to where they need to be is critical to ensuring your website meets their needs. User research is fundamental to that understanding – you can read more about this aspect of our work via our previous article ‘User research: the key to successful digital products’.

Research tools

By implementing research tools we are able to analyse user behaviour to assess how your site is being used, identifying their preferences and any pain points along the way. This provides us with a clear direction of how to design and structure your site for the best possible user experience.

There are various methods we might use to develop a clear picture of user behaviours, such as:

reviewing heat maps (these record mouse movements i.e clicks and scrolls)
observing website use in real time
long or short-form questionnaires
user interviews.

Informed decision-making

We use this type of data to inform recommendations we make around the development or revisions of your website, to create a user-friendly, positive experience to engage and retain users.

These recommendations may be around aspects such as:

Information scents to be used – this means providing clear cues to guide your users to find the information they are looking for
Language throughout the website – such as actionable language for clear direction, labels for the navigation itself that make sense to users in the given context
Hierarchy of content to decide placement on the site – informed by and dependent upon your user needs
Intuitive organisation – making your site make sense to your users
How to ensure a logical flow of information – making the information your site houses easily discoverable by the people that need it
Positioning and design of the site navigation.

Once we’ve developed a revised site map and navigation based upon our research findings the next step is, yes you’ve got it, more research.

By carrying out testing (via testing trees) on our proposed revisions we are able to identify any remaining issues, refine these and reiterate the structure again to ensure we are matching the site’s functionality to the users’ needs. This was an important aspect of our work with TASIS England.

6 ways research can inform your site navigation

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Our work with TASIS England

Who are TASIS England and what do they do?

TASIS England is an award-winning independent school that boasts a global community of students and families, and is a popular choice for many families who are relocating to the UK or looking for top education and boarding for their children.

They came to us looking for input on how they could improve their current website to support families to be more independent in their information-finding and encourage more applications to attend the school.

Image of TASIS England’s new navigation on navy blue background

How did we apply UX methods to make recommendations for a revised navigation?

The bulk of our journey with TASIS England involved various user research.

This comprised a comprehensive audit of how the website was currently being used (via our User Behaviour Audit) including:

Observations of recorded sessions on key user journeys
Analysis of heat maps (scroll, clicks and other mouse movements)
Microsurveys completed over a 4-week period
Engagement of interview participants.

To make sure we weren’t relying on our own assumptions or biases surrounding the website’s users, we also coordinated interviews with various audiences. Not only did this provide us with an in-depth understanding of customer preferences but paved the way towards a smoother user journey and additional recommendations for future improvements.

After redesigning a navigation based on our analysis of the data, they were then thoroughly tested, twice – once for each iteration. By incorporating two tree tests into our process we were able to get TASIS England to the point where their revised navigation had a pass rate across five out of six user tasks with some additional, actionable recommendations being made.

Split image displaying screenshots of the user research report and the new section navigation

Image of TASIS England’s previous navigation on grey background

The project ultimately included

1 kick off-workshop. 1 user behaviour audit. 27 recommendations. 176 insights. 11 bugs discovered. 10 customer interviews. 1 research report. 5 suggested sitemaps. 2 tree tests. 2 reports. 12 recommendations. 200 tree test participants. 1 finalised sitemap.

Most importantly, what did our client have to say?

“Partnering with Hancock & Rowe has transformed how we approach our website navigation, making it easier for families to find information quickly and effortlessly. Their user-first research and strategic insights give us confidence that we'll not only increase applications but also reduce support inquiries, freeing up our team to focus on what matters most. In addition, their data-led approach and the team's experience helped us to manage our internal stakeholders more efficiently and get buy-in. We’re excited to implement their work and see the lasting impact.”

Christina Adamopoulou – Head of Marketing and Communications, TASIS England

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Final thoughts

Understanding the needs of your users is crucial in creating clear direction and structure for your website and product. By incorporating user research throughout the site mapping and navigation design process, you can create more intuitive, user-friendly structures that align with both user needs and business objectives.

Getting this important aspect right will increase the independence of your users, reducing their need to contact support for information or guidance on tasks. This approach not only saves time and reduces stress for both users and teams but also enhances overall user satisfaction.

Remember: the key to success lies in continually validating your decisions through user testing and iterating as needed, ensuring that your digital product remains responsive to evolving user needs and expectations.