A crucial part of the navigation is the information architecture. Working with our UX team, we conducted multiple IA white-boarding sessions that helped everything that should be positioned. We prioritized Salesforce's core values and KPIs to help drive the UI and interaction decisions.

The main goal for the navigation was getting the user where they needed to go. In the beginning this meant giving the user all of Salesforce's products as well as key features within those products.

The main KPI for this was form completion – getting users to buy into Salesforce instantly. We were able to accomplish this by adding product demos to every tab. This allowed users to quickly learn about each product before getting to their respective page.

This navigation was very effective for the number of products we had at the time. By the next year, Salesforce had more than doubled its product offerings from 5 core products to 12 and this navigation solution could not scale.

With help from content strategy and core architecture team we re-designed the navigation to vertical arrangement which allowed us to scale more effectively, showcase the core product within each category, and give a deeper dive into the the product features.

As our product stakeholder list grew, so did the need to showcase more and more features. Even through the hierarchical funnel, the navigation gave users too many click paths. Analytics showed a very low click through rate for features for low returns on valuable screen real estate. This eventually has a negative impact on qualified leads.

Through research we found that users saw Salesforce as one product and there was no difference between the different cloud offerings. They were also confused by the product cloud names.

Using this, I purged all secondary and tertiary links (96 at the time) from the product navigation. Instead of using product names like Sales Cloud or myTrailhead, we used language that described the offerings, like Sales and Enablement – respectively. This allowed for a cleaner experience and allowed users to deep dive into products to nurture a more qualified lead.

This approach allowed the navigation to get users where they need to — quickly, improved overall site speed and qualified leads by 30% globally.