projects / Telus: Enterprise IA Refresh

Telus: Enterprise IA Refresh

Redesigning the Telus meganav so prospective internet customers could find a plan without digging for one.

The refreshed Telus menu on a phone

Problem

Telus's internet plans sat several layers deep in a legacy menu, and people were leaving before they ever saw a price. All Purpose Creative was brought in as a third-party design team, working with Telus's internal designers and the sales team that hired us.

01Audit

Pages were surfacing earlier than they should, and labels were doing two jobs at once.

I mapped click-through on every menu item in the internet flow to find where people dropped off. Plans pages drew the most visits, yet low-traffic pages that led nowhere were still in the menu.

Our survey of 23 internet buyers across B.C. and Alberta backed this up. Price and reliability came up in almost every answer, and so did jargon, unclear speeds and hidden fees. Ten of the 23 weren't the person who managed the household's internet, so the menu couldn't assume people knew what they needed.

Before
The existing Telus menu, annotated with its three tiers 1 2 3
Fig. 1The existing menu, three tiers deep. 1Plans and pricing, buried on the third tier. 2An account task sitting among things to buy. 3Offers competing with the menu itself.

02Restructure

Every menu item now does one of three jobs: help you buy, help you learn, or help you manage.

With the user researcher, I restructured the IA around what someone is trying to do rather than which team owns the page. Telus's researchers had found the structure changed from one product to the next, which broke people's mental map of the site, and that much of it read as 'marketing speak'.

So the same three groups could carry across every section, in plain labels. Prospective customers identified with Learn far more than Manage, and the order followed that. Each label had to be recognisable, work on desktop and mobile, and match the page it led to.

Before The old Products and Services menu: Explore Internet, Internet and TV Bundles, Why TELUS PureFibre and Internet Add-ons as headings with links beneath, then Rural Internet, Switch to TELUS and Move your services as headings on their own
After The same items sorted into three groups: Shop (action-based), Learn (education-based) and Manage (account-based)
Fig. 2Every item under Products & Services, before and after sorting. Headings, links and account tasks sat side by side; now each sits under the job it does.

03Test

Labels were settled by testing, not by opinion.

Review rounds questioned labels one at a time: would customers understand 'Move your services', did 'Plans and pricing' say the same thing twice, did the PureFibre name in a link help or just repeat itself.

Ideas grounded in Telus's existing research went straight to A/B tests. The rest went to usability testing first, measured on discoverability, task difficulty and time on task, and every change had a go/no-go before development.

Hidden menus are found less often on mobile, so we explored a mobile menu of its own rather than a shrunk desktop one.

Lo-fi Lo-fi wireframe of the open menu: Shop, Learn and Manage columns of grey placeholder links, with two promo blocks and green buttons on the right
Hi-fi Hi-fi version of the same menu with real labels under Shop, Learn and Manage, and two ad blocks on the right
Fig. 3The menu from lo-fi to hi-fi. The structure was agreed in grey first, then real labels went in to be tested.
Before After Job
Plans and PricingPlans & pricingShop
Why TELUS PureFibre / What is PureFibreAbout PureFibreLearn
Wi-Fi AdvantageAbout TELUS Wi-Fi PlusLearn
Internet Add-onsAbout internet add-onsLearn
Move your services (under Rural Internet)Move your servicesManage
Fig. 4What changed, label by label, from the old menu to the live one.

04Launch

The internet flow came up out of the legacy navigation, with plans and pricing one click from the menu.

Shop, Learn and Manage now sit side by side on telus.com. I also recommended carrying the same labelling approach to mobile, where the menu has to say more in less space.

After
The refreshed Telus meganav 1 2 3
Fig. 5The refreshed meganav, live on telus.com. 1Shop, with plans and pricing one click in. 2Learn. 3Manage.

Results

+42% increase in desired
page visits after launch
+4% click-through rate to the
Plans Page from the menu

What I learned

A menu is a set of promises to the user. Most of the drop-off came from labels promising too much, so the real work was deciding what each item promised, then organising them so they could be scanned.