Strategic IA improvements at Steady

Context

As the only senior product designer, I took ownership of the IA of the whole product and marketing pages for 3 different user groups - visitors (potential users), members and creators.

Goal:

• Increase the usability of the product: remove confusions and align namings across pages.
• Improve SEO and brand awareness.

Project duration: 2022–2023

Challenges

I. Major feature releases (meaning a bunch of new pages and a new menu) from the previous year. These functions created journeys that were not mapped out, and the flows broke down in some places.

II. Domain expertise was missing from the company. Colleagues only saw it was not working well, but were not even sure if its important and whose job it is to fix it.

III. There was very little information to start with. The only data was the first impression of the somewhat confused onboarding employees and watching general discovery research calls.

IV. Important links were hard to find or missing in certain views, and we displayed the same menus and footers in very different use cases.

V. After new EU legislations, some required links were missing from certain views.

VI. I needed buy-in from Head of Marketing, Engineering and Product to prioritise the necessary changes.

Results

• 71- 92% increase in SEO ranking and organic traffic growth for certain keyword
• Traffic increase on our Discovery page, where we show creator projects
  
• Consistency in naming and styling
• Accurate page view analytics in the backend
• More transparent menu structures that increased clarity across the product: no support ticket received about looking for a page or function where we changed the location or removed it entirely.

What? And how? Keep scrolling to see the process.

Solutions

Getting buy-in to prioritise changes

• take charge to move this project forward not as its own initiative, but bundle it with more clearly measurable projects to make it a priority
• tie these changes to improving our SEO and brand awareness

Product design

• map out the whole product to see the inconsistencies and misalignments:
  • creator backend pages
  • member backend pages
  • visitor-facing creator pages
  • all top navigation menus (where users can switch between creator and member view)
  • all the footers
• agree and align on naming inconsistencies
• increase internal linking to make creator projects and our own content more discoverable
• clarify and implement new legal requirements
• introduce Hotjar to collect screen recordings of users navigating the product
  
• increase brand awareness by switching out the logo to a wordmark&tagline of the company in the top menu and the footer
• added more entry points to our content on creator guidance to make it more accessible both to visitors and creators

Menu changes

All the footers: project pages (backend and visitor-facing), company pages and project emails

• increased internal linking to our guidance content to establish ourselves as an expert on the topic to improve SEO
• added the wordmark and the tagline to every footer to increase brand awareness
• aligned the wording and the visual style to improve consistency and trust of the platform
• added company contacts to project footers as well (legal requirement)
• added a CTA to creator onboarding to increase new creator signups

Top navigation changes: project pages and company pages for visitors and logged-in users

Creator backend: remove everything in the right menu that's also available in the backend settings, this is a place to switch between projects and user modes

Visitor view on project pages–this is a place owned by creators and helping their revenue growth:

• removed menu items that are relevant relevant to Steady, the company, not the creator
• added a search field to improve creator discoverability, and a [Subscribe] button to improve their newsletter reach
• the second row of navigation helps showcase their content and the option to purchase a membership to improve membership conversion rate and decrease dropoffs

Member views on project pages–this is a place owned by creators to help improve member's engagement:

• removed menu items that are relevant relevant to Steady, the company, not the creator
• the second row of navigation helps to find and showcase their content

Visitor view of the Steady marketing pages (from top to bottom!)

• increased internal linking to our guidance content to establish ourselves as an expert on the topic to improve SEO
• made Discovery more easily accessible by adding a direct search field to improve creator's reach
• aligned elements to our design system to improve usability and consistency

Logged-in view of the Steady marketing pages for members/creators (from top to bottom!)

• removed everything from the right-hand menu besides switching between memberships and projects to eliminate duplicates
• aligned elements to our design system to improve usability and consistency
  

Left menu changes in the creator and member backends

• clarified and separated category names from page names to start collecting accurate page visit analytics
  
• moved pages under the correct category
• changed Publication to Project
• added a new page (and table) for  (free) 'Subscribers', as their data had almost nothing in common with members
• added a new 'Home' page as the starting point for next actions and steps, and renamed Dashboard to Analytics to avoid confusion
• moved some input fields between Project/General and Project/About to accurately reflect the page's purpose
• opened up the member's table menu list to give a better overview of the settings