How To Redesign Complex Navigation:
How We Restructured Intercom’s IA (https://lnkd.in/ezbHUYyU), a practical case study on how the Intercom team fixed the maze of features, settings, workflows and navigation labels. Neatly put together by Pranava Tandra.
🚫 Customers can’t use features they can’t discover.
✅ Simplifying is about bringing order to complexity.
✅ First, map out the flow of customers and their needs.
✅ Study how people navigate and where they get stuck.
✅ Spot recurring friction points that resonate across tasks.
🚫 Don’t group features based on how they are built.
✅ Group features based on how users think and work.
✅ Bring similar things together (e.g. Help, Knowledge).
✅ Establish dedicated hubs for key parts of the product.
✅ Relocate low-priority features to workflows/settings.
🤔 People don’t use products in predictable ways.
🤔 Users often struggle with cryptic icons and labels.
✅ Show labels in a collapsible nav drawer, not on hover.
✅ Use content testing to track if users understand icons.
✅ Allow users to pin/unpin items in their navigation drawer.
One of the helpful ways to prioritize sections in navigation is by layering customer journeys on top of each other to identify most frequent areas of use. The busy “hubs” of user interactions typically require faster and easier access across the product.
Instead of using AI or designer’s mental model to reorganize navigation, invite users and run a card sorting session with them. People are usually not very good at naming things, but very good at grouping and organizing them. And once you have a new navigation, test and refine it with tree testing.
As Pranava writes, real people don’t use products in perfectly predictable ways. They come in with an infinite variety of needs, assumptions, and goals. Our job is to address friction points for their realities — by reducing confusion and maximizing clarity.
Good IA work and UX research can do just that.