Menu Consolidation
Full overhaul of system navigation
The Challenge
Navigation is the core of any good interface, but in our legacy system, our users were often in the dark. Everyday workflows were fragmented across multiple web apps like "Asset Manager" and "Asset Accountant," forcing users to constantly switch apps to finish a single task. The plan was to consolidate everything into core apps like "Assets" or "Payables" with permission-based visibility. However, each legacy app dragged along over 100 menu items buried in a deeply nested tree. This was years of navigation debt that needed to be resolved.
My Approach
I led the effort to resolve this navigation debt across complex financial domains where I wasn't the subject matter expert. Instead of guessing, I partnered directly with our product teams to leverage their domain knowledge, requesting help in creating personas and tasking them with organizing the menu items into 9 or fewer primary categories. To make sure these new categories matched how users actually thought, I worked with our UX research team to run tree tests on the proposed navigation structures, validating our assumptions before building the final designs.
The Hurdle
Moving away from deep sidebar trees meant all those hundreds of menu items needed a clear home on the pages themselves. I needed to ensure we weren't just pushing the same visual clutter from the sidebar onto the page. Working alongside our product owners, I focused on finding ways to categorize navigation sections into task-based groupings so users could find what they needed intuitively without feeling overwhelmed.
The Results
I anticipated the inevitable “where’d you move my stuff?” which we accounted for by implementing improved keyword searches. Even if a user wanted to find the legacy label for something, it would surface the correct item and take them to the new page. While I would have liked to run additional rounds of client testing post-launch, this overhaul successfully eliminated fragmented app-switching, made browsing significantly more efficient, and established a scalable framework for future navigation updates.