Year: June 2022
Timeline: 3 weeks
Role: Lead UX Designer
Company: Freetrade
The case study focuses on enhancing the Information Architecture (IA) for Freetrade, an app-based share dealing platform, to support the introduction of new subscription plans.
Establish a new Information Architecture for Freetrade that could scale effectively, improve navigation, and enhance user experience. This was in order to better present the benefits and pricing of new subscription plans, ensuring that users could easily find and understand the information they needed.
Freetrade is a user-friendly, app-based, share dealing platform offering a range of investment products. Recently Freetrade launched a new subscription model aimed to simplify and better communicate benefits and pricing. As part of the subscription launch, the product and marketing website had to undergo huge changes to promote and communicate the details of the new plans. This case study will be detailing the process I lead on to assess the current Information Architecture and suggest and implement an improved solution to support the launch of the new subscription plans.
With the plan subscriptions rolling out in July (Starter, Standard, and Plus), we need to understand how customers navigate through our account types and plans and the user journey they would expect to take to sign up and find relevant information.
Desktop sticky navigations with ‘get started’ CTAs in the top right corner
We had a few brainstorming sessions between branding and design with a focus on subscriptions. We looked at the limitations of the current navigation and produced a few ideas around categorisation. From here we established three variations that we would run user tests on (see below).
We want to test 3 variants of a navigational structure to validate our information architecture decision. We will first use a method called tree testing. This is because we have already decided on a few variations of the navigation and we want to validate the find-ability of different topics across each variation.
There are a couple of methods when it comes to testing information architecture. tree testing and card sorting are two great ones, to begin with. We decided to start with tree testing as we had already decided on a few variations of the structure and labels and we were looking to validate each one. Card sorting is great if you want to understand how users would structure navigation content, which was slightly different from how we approached it.
The participant is asked to complete a task and they navigate through the levels and then pick a page as the correct destination. We select which pages are correct for each question before the test is sent out.
We will test on our existing customers using internal resources like Intercom to email customers and ask them to participate in a user test.
13 participants per test. There will be a total of three tests conducted.
We will have a total of ten questions. This is the recommended amount by Optimal to ensure we don’t risk participants becoming too familiar with our tree, which would bias the results for later tasks.
From the research we’ve seen above, I’d recommend implementing a hybrid between variations 2 and 3. In variation 3 we have ‘Stocks’ housed within ‘What we offer’. However, as we saw a 40% decrease in variation 3, I’d recommend implementing it in the same way as variation 2 (at top level).
see the fully operational navigation at freetrade.io.
