Global Navigation
Plaid
UX / UI Design
Information Architecture
Role
Lead Designer
Team
Design Web: Lindsay G.
Product Marketing: Khalid N.
Product Research: Brayden D.
WebDev Engineering: Jamie K., Bhumi P.
Plaid Inc. is a financial technology company that provides a platform, using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), to connect consumer bank accounts with financial apps, like Venmo and Chime.
Product marketing and sales teams identified a growing need to update plaid.com's global navigation bar to better align with the evolving target audience, which had shifted from developers to key business decision-makers. To address this, they advocated for incorporating product solution bundles directly into the navigation, emphasizing features that resonate with business concerns. This customer-focused approach aimed to enhance user experience by making it easier for decision-makers to find relevant solutions, reflecting the changing priorities and needs of the target market.
Challenge
Simplify and improve accessibility to improve the browsing experience for a diverse audience:
Stronger focus key business decision makers
Product solution relationships
Dedicated consumer support content and spaces to avoid confusion over customer vs. consumer information
Maintain brand identity while increasing way-finding and discoverability.
Process
Early discussions with the teams responsible for providing content for the updated global navigation showed signs that there was no concrete list of page links. To keep the project on track, I used the current navigation and the most requested updates to design a flexible structure that would be easy to update.
Some major changes I introduced include:
Smaller overall bar height, type size, and logo size
Three tier link system
Compact, floating dropdown menus
Nested tertiary links
Optional body descriptors
Interactivity system on how links behave based on their hierarchy
Removal of esoteric iconography that are mainly interpretable internally
Adaptive stickiness (hidden when scrolling down and reappears when scrolling up)
Comparison between previous and updated global navigation
Desktop interactivity demo
Tablet / mobile interactivity demo
Outcome
The updated organizational structure of the navigation now allows prospective customers and visitors a better bird's eye view of related product offerings and provides quick blurbs when product titles alone might not be clear enough. Downgrading non-essential links to the larger footer section streamlined the navigation bar and allows for future top level links. Overall, the navigation has the potential to shrink or grow based on the needs of the marketing and sales teams for what should be relevant to potential customers.