As part of a BigCommerce hackathon, I redesigned the BigCommerce navigation to modernize the experience, fix major usability issues and future-proof the platform for scalability. Working with two outstanding front-end developers, we took a risk to show our executive leadership a new brand for the product.
Our entry won the Weiss-ly done hackathon award and is now a major initiative on the product roadmap.
Like many other companies of similar size and design maturity, BigCommerce is working towards a cohesive design system in its web application. While this is drastically improving the user experience across the platform, one area that remains unchanged is the navigation.
While not unusable, the navigation presents a few issues that detract from the core merchant experience and date the platform. For instance, the tabs are 2-tiered and drilling down means the merchant loses context.
Without a modern, componentized navigation, BigCommerce is running into more issues with scalability as more features are added. BigCommerce merchants spend hours a day maintaining their stores - confusing nav means they are wasting time, money and have a greater potential to churn.
In 2019, BigCommerce started developing and adapting BigDesign, its product design system for core product and partner experiences. BigDesign is the now the standard for new product initiatives to maintain consistency and modernize the platform.
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Moreover, the BigCommerce app is built with modern UI and a different navigation that creates more inconsistencies in the holistic merchant experience.
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The product design team has had several concepts to close the experience gap and create a new visual language for the platform, but without a product initiative to tie them to, these concepts have been mostly forgotten. Our leadership did not know navigation was an issue because no other initiative created a strong enough dependency to change it.
Bi-annually, BigCommerce hosts hackathons to encourage developers to work on something inspiring to them and generate new ideas. in the 2022 H2 hackathon, I joined a team of two front-end developers to create a new vision for our navigation: an MVP that was implemented in development, and a design concept for how the initiative would scale.
While this concept solved many of the navigation issues, BigCommerce is a huge platform with lots of features. We only scraped the tip of the iceberg - the design still had a lot to be ironed out.
Our concept was well received by leadership and won the Weiss-ly done award to improvements to the user experience. Our executive leadership liked it so much they have since made a new initiative from our concepts and prioritized user research to solve more issues in the navigation.
