Navigation Taxonomy

LEAD PRODUCT DESIGNER

Unity-Nav-Top

RESPONSABILITIES

Lead the design team responsible for the Unity Asset Store, a marketplace widely used to buy and sell game assets and plugins.

WHAT IS UNITY?

Unity is a mobile leading game engine company renowned for its versatile Unity Engine, widely used by developers to create interactive experiences across various platforms.

Challenges

Unity, as an engineering-led company, had developed a legacy naming structure for the Asset Store driven by engineering and marketing decisions rather than user needs. This mismatch resulted in users struggling to locate the resources they needed for their projects.

While a long-term solution involved replacing the main search engine, the cost of inaction was too high to wait for its completion. We needed an interim solution to improve navigation and mitigate user frustrations while continuing work on the larger search engine project.

The Approach

To address the navigation challenges, we prioritized a data-driven and user-centered approach. By leveraging user feedback gathered during the Design Vision phase, we sought to identify key misalignments in the naming structure and propose a revised navigation system that reflected how users naturally searched for resources, using their own naming conventions.

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Steps

1. Research
• Collected existing user feedback the Designc Vision initiative to pinpoint navigation user pains.
• Identified key themes indicating confusion around category naming and resource discoverability.

2. Internal workshops:
Ran a 'Card Sorting Test' with 5 users from Unity’s internal user pool to uncover the largest misalignments in the naming structure.

3. Findings:
• Analyzed the results to create a draft navigation structure that aligned more closely with user expectations.
• Conducted a 'Tree Testing Study' with 25 external users to validate the proposed navigation structure.

4. Execution:
• Iterated on the results to finalize the new navigation system, which was integrated into the ongoing Design System rebuild initiative.

Card Sorting Worskhop

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Taxonomy Exploration

U-Wireframe-Exploration

Final solution

Here is the first wireframe of the new navigation, designed to align with user behavior and improve discoverability based on insights from our research and testing

Wireframes

U-wires-nav

High Fidelity Prototype

Results

12%

Increase in navigation usage, representing 10% of overall traffic.

New Solution

Reduced user frustration and provided a solid interim alternative.

70%

Users successfully completed their tasks using the new navigation structure.

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