Unifying Navigation for Thirty+ Pages
A platform's entire information architecture, redesigned in ten days
All case studies are shared under NDA for portfolio review purposes only. The platform serves investment professionals conducting research, deal sourcing, and portfolio monitoring. Exact metrics values are withheld and replaced with proxy phrasing due to confidentiality constraints. Happy to walk through the details personally.
Problem given
A six-year-old platform had grown over the years without information architecture governance. Users routinely had thirty to forty internal tabs open, could not find features, and called the product confusing.
Problem framed
The navigation model encoded the initial mental model of the product that had not evolved as the product grew. This was a structural problem.
Constraints
Legacy routing architecture could not be rebuilt; the platform had thirty+ pages, all of which had to remain accessible; zero-downtime deployment required
My role
Owned research, IA design, interaction specs, rollout strategy, stakeholder alignment
What shipped
Intent-based taxonomy with three overarching categories (Find, Dig Deep, Connect) covering five sidebar modules; left sidebar navigation with collapsable states; section header components for wayfinding; forced migration with rollback safety valve
Impact
One user reverted and eventually adopted the new nav; navigation support tickets dropped to negligible levels; launch month hit 222 desktop MAUs and 122 power users, both 13-month highs; product architecture simplified into three intent categories