National Geographic Expeditions homepage
Overview
National Geographic Expeditions is an “expedition” booking site that allows users to choose from a vast number of travel itineraries, activity choices, and transportation options. Every trip is catered to a specific kind of traveler, whether they’re interested in photography, river cruises, hiking, or private jet trips.
Scope
Improve the navigability of the website, particularly in its primary and secondary navigation, and make recommended sitemap and menu title changes. Additionally, analyze the site's overall design through heuristics.
Methods & Practices
Heuristic Analysis • Card Sorting (Open & Closed) • Sitemap • User Flow
Tools
Draw.io • Google Sheets
Timeline
1-week design sprint
Where are we currently? Heuristic evaluation
Based on the Abby Method, I analyzed 4 different pages within the National Geographic Expeditions site.
The target issue for our client was the navigability and clarity of their site.
Where are we currently? Original sitemap
Beginning analysis: open card sort
To begin analyzing the site’s secondary navigation, I conducted an open card sort with 5 participants. Trends emerged, and 5 dominant labels stood out:
Open card sort: analysis of results
Some names (which are green on the left-hand column) had a strong consensus for which category they fell under.
Some — such as New Trips, History & Archaeology, and Student Journey—did not.
I categorized names by how problematic they were, based on how many times they appeared in different categories (had less consensus):
Red as urgent issues
Pale red as major issues
Orange as medium issues
Yellow as minor issues
I focused on these problem areas with my closed cart sort.
Testing new categories: closed card sort
From the 5 dominant labels that rose from the open card sort, I created categories for my closed card sort.
I modified names and labels that had a severe lack of consensus or were being misinterpreted often. Then, I found 5 participants for the closed card sort.
Closed card sort: analysis of results
Looking at the results from the open and closed sorts, how did my changes to the labels help?
We went from 20 problem areas with many urgent and major issues to 8 problem areas with no urgent issues and few major issues.
National Geographic Expeditions: revised sitemap
Final thoughts
While National Geographic Expeditions had easy-to-understand titles after a user went to the titular page and read the description of the trip, it cannot be assumed that all confused or unclear users will go to such efforts. Therefore, structuring the navigation of a site to be clear and easy to comprehend is important for a website’s usability.
For the future, National Geographic Expeditions could still be improved in various ways:
Implement more name changes based on the results of the closed card sort, especially the names ranked as “major issues.”
Improve other aspects of the site which performed poorly in heuristic analysis.
Consider adding pages or content based on what users thought should exist in a particular category—for example, adding a “Photography” section to Stories & Testimonials.
