Trustpilot
Leading the information architecture re-build of a global top 300 website
What I did
IA
UX
UI
Prototyping
Design Management
Product Strategy
Data analysis
User Research
Launched Feb 2020
Trustpilot.com
UX
UI
Prototyping
Design Management
Product Strategy
Data analysis
User Research
Launched Feb 2020
Trustpilot.com
The brief
‘Read reviews. Write reviews. Find companies’.
As part of Trustpilots drive to move from a site ‘to write reviews’ to the best destination on the web to compare companies I lead a team of devs, stakeholders and researchers to rebuild the information architecture to make it easer to find and compare businesses
My role
I was responsible for creating the new information architecture designing the UX and UI and creating the success metrics to measure impact on Trustpilot, businesses and users needs.
Working with a small team of dev’s I co-ordinated the role out of the IA, testing and mapped potential future iterations.
Working with a small team of dev’s I co-ordinated the role out of the IA, testing and mapped potential future iterations.
The new UI 😃
The old UI 🤔
Nicky Grunfeld
Design Director at Trustpilot
Design Director at Trustpilot
‘He impressed me with how fast he would wrap his head around the new context and bring the team together around novel ways to solve their problems and approach discovery work. On the design team we’re still using some of the techniques he’s introduced.’
Learning as a team
Visualising conversion funnels and highlighting unusual user behaviour helped build buy-in with stakeholders helping to remove potential blockers.
Introducing best practice
To create a team understanding of ‘Good IA’, I created a workshop asking participants to research specific websites and answer set questions about their size and structure.
Mapping conversion funnels for consensus
Humanising the journey with pain points
Introducing best practice
To create an aligned understanding of ‘Good IA’ I asked my workshop participants to research specific websites, answering questions about their size and structure.
Mapping well-known websites IA's onto a single board helped visualise patterns
Bryce DehringProduct Manager at Trustpilot
‘Derrick is a brilliant designer who I learned a great deal from during our time together. I was most impressed by how quickly he drove value: within three days of joining our team, he immersed himself in the product, understood our users’ needs, and designed a successful A/B test.
Not only a fantastic designer with deep understanding of modern discovery techniques, Derrick also has a keen product mindset, is a fantastic communicator, and brings great energy to the team. A true joy to work with.’
I created learning plans to help manage stakeholders
Stakeholder Management
Mis-communiucation was one of the biggest risk of the new IA project. To manage flow of info from our team I created learning plans documenting the projects riskiest assumptions and, the process I would use to resolve them.
I mapped the IA survey to share with User Researchers
To understand the quailty of the old IA I defined ‘success metrics’. A survey measured users abilty to find new compaines and their satisfaction with the explorative journey.
Stakeholder management
Mis-communication was one of the biggest risk of the project. To manage stakeholder expectation I created learning plans, documenting the our riskiest assumptions and, the process I would use to resolve them.
I defined ‘success metrics’ to understand the quality of the existing IA. A survey measured users ability to find new companies and their satisfaction with the journey.
Hella’ testing
Because of Trustpilots status as a global top 300 site it was important to reduce the risk of our IA decisions. This meant a high number of users were needed to create statistically validate testing results.
To meet this need I experimented with Amazons Mechanical Turk to recruit the perfect user persona. Allowing me to recruit and tested 300+ users, from UK and US in less than 2 weeks.
I created a card sorting test to find common structures and terminology and tasked users to find categories on the new and existing IA to compare usability.
To meet this need I experimented with Amazons Mechanical Turk to recruit the perfect user persona. Allowing me to recruit and tested 300+ users, from UK and US in less than 2 weeks.
I created a card sorting test to find common structures and terminology and tasked users to find categories on the new and existing IA to compare usability.
Prototyping with real data
I populated hi-res mock-ups with real data to spot negative effects on the our UI. While prototyping the new journey to highlight nuanced interactions communicate with engineers.
Key takeaways
Users definition of a 'good' IA structure is not grounded in logic but personal experience, preferences and location. Each factor plays a role in the mental models we use to understand grouped data.