Dell Header and Navigation
Unifying site header, footer, navigation, account management, and more. This project addressed the issues of various departments have tended to operate on silos creating their own approach to
ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
Design Lead: facilitating discovery and framing, research, interviews, analysis, and direction for the design team to explore solutions.
Challenge
The current state of Dell’s online properties and internal organizations was aligned with customer segments. Customers had to remember or bookmark different URLs to return to their desired content and functionality. In some cases, the sites interlinked within the global navigation, but as soon as you clicked on something that changed sites, UI and navigation would also change, placing a heavy burden on the customer.
Problem
The project had to address disparate UIs, overlapping information architectures, disparate approaches to branding and navigation, and create a foundation for the future vision state. This first step was closely followed by a companion effort to unify and simplify the taxonomy and information architecture merging disparate sites into a single domain.
Discovery
Project's initial scope: limited to customer-facing commerce and informational sites, which still meant 30-40 stakeholders and organizations.
The discovery process included:
Stakeholder interviews, requirements, and synthesis
Competitive research
Industry best practice research - compiling Baymard Institute research and supplementing it with numerous UX publications on research, findings, and guidance.
Analysis of internal historical research
Framing
Started testing various approaches to complex site navigation. We landed on three that best aligned with everything we had learned and supported the existing depth of the architecture without requiring significant change, as the architecture is simplified over time. We ran them through numerous tests with participants representing various customer personas.
Although the hover interaction has many benefits, its behaviors and interactions were issues that required special attention due to known usability downsides. Accounting for direct angular cursor paths, imprecise movement around menu edges and bottoms, and both touch screens and keyboard/mouse setups required testing multiple approaches to the problem. The team eventually landed on solutions that significantly reduced unintended errors and consistently better outcomes.
Additionally, the solution was released by country groupings and ramped in production to ensure activity and metrics were closely monitored against existing performance and any issues were addressed before the next release. This provided additional insights and information to continue to evolve the solution.
Testing
Solution
The solution was driven by progressive research, testing, and resulting data. It is the first step in a longer journey that will evolve as new application types are supported, business approaches and offerings change to meet changing demands of customers, and the family of applications becomes more integrated to provide a seamless, personalized experience for Dell’s customers.
It is a basic header layout with standard branding, a visible search feature geared toward function over aesthetics, utility navigation in the upper right where people expect to find it, and a horizontal tabular approach to first-level global navigation revealing second and third-level on hover.
Commerce Solution
Product
Header and Global Navigation
Dropdown Menu System
Utility Navigation Menu System
Responsive header
Responsive Footer
Components & Patterns: Interactions, States Documentation
Accessibility Documentation
Maybe one of the most satisfying aspects of the work was the extent to which the team embraced the design and documentation addressing accessibility compliance. The following figure exemplifies some of the complexity that must be addressed.
Outcomes
The solution created met internal requirements and consistently employed usability best practices to benefit our customers. A pilot launch was released in two countries to observe usage in production environments and ensure no negative impacts on key metrics. The pilot was deemed successful, and full production rollouts have taken place across all Dell cornerstone applications and scaled globally.
Resulting Cohesiveness
The product team assembled for this project has continued to evolve the solution to address additional use cases presented by some of Dell’s more specialized offerings. It is also being adopted by the more productivity-focused applications serving Dell’s customers, partners, and internal support.
This foundation has allowed Dell to break down previous barriers created by siloed organizations and set the stage for transitioning to a modern seamless experience for our customers. This project is one of many efforts required to achieve the desired vision, but it represents a successful crucial first step on the journey.
