Navigation & Information Architecture
Linktree Navigation
Year
2024
My role
Design Lead
The team
Product Manager
Product Designer
Engineering team
Linktree, a link-in-bio platform, allows users to consolidate their digital presence into a single link. Over the past four years, the link-in-bio category has grown significantly, with Linktree reaching 50 million users in 2024. To meet evolving customer needs, Linktree introduced several new features.However, Linktree found many customers were struggling to both discover and adopt these new features, resulting in customer dissatisfaction and churn. Additionally the product was also suffering from a scaleability issue where the primary navigation no longer supported new products developed beyond their flagship link-in-bio solution e.g. media kits, link shortening services etc.
The challenge
The first challenge from a customer point of view was, how might we enable our customers to more easily discover the features and benefits that are most useful to them? Additionally from a business and design point of view, how might we ensure our navigation is flexible and scaleable enough to handle the needs of the business and product both now and in the future? Our primary business goals for this project included increasing feature adoption and conversion across core flows. Lagging goals included reducing customer churn and increasing monthly engaged customers.
The process — Discover
In order to kick-off this project I facilitated a cross-functional workshop that included Product Designers, Product Managers, Engineers and other senior stakeholders from around the business. During the session we unpacked previous user research, aligned on customer problems, conducted our own card-sorting exercise and also brainstormed conceptual ideas together. Following the workshop I played back the outputs to our senior leadership team including; a set of hypotheses for how we believed we could improve ease of navigation and a conceptual design direction we could test with customers.
Directionally it was agreed that on desktop we wanted to move towards a side panel navigation as we hypothesised the side panel nav with nested elements showcasing our features would allow for better discoverability for customers. On mobile we wanted to refresh our bottom tab navigation to enable ease of exploration on a mobile device.
The process — Approach
Following the workshop I took the outputs and generated design concepts and prototypes to test with customers. We also focussed on testing our proposed Information Architecture as we believed this had the most risk for confusion for Linktree customers. We were looking to test a structure that placed the 'customer goals' as the primary navigation items, with relevant features nested underneath this. e.g. 'Monetise' contained 'Linktree wallet' and 'Linktree store' etc. We hypothesised a goals drive structure would enable both greater scaleability for our product and ease of discoverability for customers.
We utilised Optimal Workshop's Tree jack/Tree testing functionality in order to complete this research where we tested if customers could find both current and future Linktree products underneath the primary navigation items.
The process — Refine
Following our customer testing on the side panel navigation and overall Information Architecture testing, we started on refining the visual design and interaction details. This included exploring a number of interaction patterns for both primary and secondary navigation items, exploring collapsible panels and fine-tuning colours, icons, motion patterns and the selected/hover states etc.
The process — Deliver
An additional challenge we faced was the time pressure from the wider business. Multiple new products were due to be released and the old navigation posed potential discoverability issues ultimately risking the success of these features. However, while we had to balance speed we also wanted to ensure we didn't risk confusing our customers by rolling out to quickly. Therefore we came up with a sequenced release plan where release 1 kept the same IA structure but used the new side nav, enabling us to showcase and release the new products to market. This phased plan enabled us to test the new navigation and IA structure thoroughly along the way and ultimately enabled us to iterate our way to our end vision with our revamped Information Architecture (release 3.)
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Final results
We released in a series of phases over a 2 month period and successfully balanced both speed of delivery whilst also ensuring the design performed well and enabled our customers to achieve their goals and discover all Linktree had to offer them. Ultimately the results achieved our initial project goals of increasing feature discoverability and adoption, while also achieving our design goal of creating a more future proofed and scaleable navigation.
1. Feature Adoption — Increase in adoption of our core features
2. Conversion across flows — Increase in customer completing core jobs to be done
across flows
3. Customer engagement — Increase in monthly recurring customers on Linktree
Exact results and metrics provided upon request.
Next Project
Linktree Editor
