Ongoing exploration, ahead of qualitative user research
Why is our product-page navigation menu barely used?
On product pages, the menu meant to guide visitors to a campsite listing's different sections (description, amenities, reviews, location...) shows a very low click rate per section.
This data raises a hypothesis: the menu doesn't stand out visually enough from the rest of the page to be perceived as a navigation tool in its own right.
Three directions are currently being tested to check this hypothesis before investing in qualitative user research.
Outcome — Next step: confront these directions with qualitative user research to validate or invalidate the visual-hierarchy hypothesis.
Context
On Homair’s product pages, a navigation menu lets visitors jump quickly to the different sections of a campsite listing (description, amenities, reviews, location…). Behavioural data tracked through Contentsquare shows an unusually low click rate per section given the expected use of this kind of component.
Hypothesis
Rather than a lack of interest in the content itself, the working hypothesis is a perception problem: the menu doesn’t stand out visually enough from the rest of the page to be identified as a navigation tool in its own right, rather than as a plain layout element.
Directions being tested
Three directions are being explored in parallel to isolate the most determining variable before committing to full user research:
- An embedded search within the menu, to turn passive navigation into an active tool
- A distinct background colour, to reinforce the visual separation from the content
- A narrower content width, to give the menu more relative presence on the page
Next step
These directions will be confronted with qualitative user research before any final decision — the goal is not to settle for a design intuition but to validate, or invalidate, the hypothesis through direct observation.
This project illustrates an ongoing practice: treating weak signals in behavioural data as starting points for hypotheses to test, not as conclusions.