Case Study: Information Architecture
In 2023, I helped a telehealth company improve their website navigation by reconfiguring the information architecture of the header menu.
THE CHALLENGE
While this telehealth company had a very thorough SEO strategy, including dozens of webpages focusing on specific medical conditions that can be treated through their app, you would never know it by browsing the site via its menu. Those pages were only accessible via a search engine; once a user was already on the site, there was no way to navigate to any of them.
Instead, the website's header menu featured just four broad categories of medical conditions, which past product marketing research had already shown didn't resonate with users, plus a hamburger menu with a few additional utility links. And without any dropdowns from those top-level categories, there was no room to add anything else to the menu.
In addition, this menu looked best on a desktop browser experience, but most of the site's traffic was actually mobile. In the mobile experience, the main navigation featured an unintuitive side-scrolling interaction, while only the less important utility links could be found in the hamburger menu.
When business leadership requested that we add another service line to the menu without removing any existing content—impossible within the current design—we took the opportunity to redesign the menu experience entirely.
MY ROLE
As the content designer on the web team, I took the lead on determining the information architecture and categorization of content in the menu. I worked with my design team to settle on the final plan for what content to feature in the menu and then collaborated with the web designer and developer to bring the idea to life in an on-brand and user-friendly way.
THE PROCESS
Here's what the old version of that header menu looked like, on both desktop and mobile:
The desktop view of the telehealth website's hero section and header navigation menu, with the hamburger menu in the top right corner expanded
The mobile viewport of the telehealth website, shown with hamburger menu collapsed and expanded
To begin, I consulted the three sources of data I had for this project:
-
product marketing research
-
Google Analytics data
-
competitor research
Our product marketing team had previously put together a comprehensive selection of research on the users that tended to utilize this telehealth service and the language and proof points that resonated with them. A key finding was that for this user base, which tended to be low-income, uninsured and less educated on healthcare in general, the categories "primary care" and "urgent care" were not particularly meaningful. They wanted a solution to their particular health problem, whatever it was, not to have to figure out whether it was the sort of issue that merited an urgent care visit vs. a primary care provider.
On the analytics front, I dove into Google Analytics to find the most important pages to feature in the menu based on two criteria: pages with the most search traffic and those that generated the most conversions after users found their way to the site. These pages fell into a few distinct categories, including those targeting specific medical conditions and others that featured particularly popular medications.
Finally, given that our design team had collectively decided a "megamenu" approach would likely give us the flexibility we needed to include the right items in the menu, I pulled a variety of competitor examples from other health tech companies to see how they organized and divided up their service lines, such as:
A selection of megamenus from various telehealth websites
From there, I put together a variety of options for the information architecture of the menu. Some kept our existing primary menu categories while others tried new parent categories. Some leaned more heavily into featuring medications over medical conditions. Here's a version we didn't go with, for reference:
Everyday Health
Acid reflux
Asthma
Back & neck pain
Diabetes
High cholesterol
High blood pressure
Migraine
Infections
Bacterial vaginosis (BV)
Dental infection
Sinus infection
Urinary tract infection (UTI)
Yeast infection
Prescriptions
Lexapro
Ozempic
Prozac
Valtrex
Wegovy
Wellbutrin
Zoloft
Learn
About K Health
Medical Team
Health Guides
Support
Symptom Checker
THE SOLUTION
Ultimately, we recognized that we needed to keep the original top-level categories, as each of those business lines had a unique pricing structure and conversion flow. However, we were able to make a variety of improvements to clarify what the categories meant for our users, including:
-
a design for the primary categories in the menu that mimicked what users would ultimately find in the app, which also featured short descriptions to explain each type of care
-
nesting a list of up to eight specific conditions or medications within each category, in alphabetical order based on popularity
-
bringing the primary CTA into the menu overlay, while replacing the vague "Get Started" call-to-action with the more specific "Get Care Now" to help drive conversions
In the end, after a variety of design innovations on the part of my design and web development counterparts, this is the new menu we produced:
The desktop view of the telehealth website's new megamenu, shown in detail view after the category "Medical Weight Management" is selected
The mobile view of the telehealth website's new menu, shown when the first level "What we treat" is selected and then the second level "Primary Care"
THE OUTCOME
Because we were deploying a new menu across the entire website, we were unable to perform a true A/B test to measure the impact of the change, but as there were no other major marketing initiatives happening at the same time to muddy the data, I looked at the analytics before and after to compare.
The metric I found most helpful to determine the effectiveness of the new menu was site CTA clicks, meaning any time a user clicked a primary CTA button anywhere on the website to move them into the conversion flow to pay for a telehealth appointment. My hypothesis was that if the new menu allowed users to more easily find the information they were looking for, they would start the process of requesting medical care at a higher rate.
In the two-week period following the launch of the new website navigation, overall site CTA clicks increased 30% compared to the previous two weeks, The company considered this improvement a major success.