B2C

TalkTalk Telecoms

TalkTalk is a UK-based telecom provider offering broadband, TV, mobile, and phone services. Known for affordable pricing, it serves millions of customers. TalkTalk became an independent company in 2010 and has faced challenges like cybersecurity breaches but remains a major player in the UK's telecom market.

Client

Platform

Information Architecture

Role

Leading the end-to-end research | UX

2019-2019

What our client wanted

To improve the ‘TalkTalk My Account’ navigation menu structure by making it easier for customers to navigate and find what they are after.

The existing ‘My Account’ navigation menu has been previously developed with no user input. 

Based on secondary data gathered from TalkTalk Call Centre, business found out a high-volume of customers had complained about difficulties in finding what they needed within the ‘My Account’ section.

Many of customers ended up contacting the TalkTalk Call Centre for basic assistance that the ‘My Account’ feature should have enabled them to self-serve, highlighting usability issues that needed addressing.

The work

To kick off the work, we dived deeper to firstly understand why the current navigation menu wasn’t working for the business or the customers!
Our research revealed:

Survey Analysis

Based on surveys ran within My Account I gained a high volume of customers complaining about the unfriendliness of the navigation menu.

Expert Review

Having analysed the existing navigation menu, there were a high number of duplications, label inconsistency, usability issues, accessibility issues, etc.

Approach

To enhance the ‘My Account’ navigation, we planned to conduct a card sorting exercise to better understand users' mental models and inform the information architecture. This would then be followed by a tree test to evaluate the proposed navigation structure, allowing users to locate where specific tasks could be completed in the new menu layout.

Existing TalkTalk My Account Navigation Menu

To identify patterns in user behaviour and mental models, we recruited 16 participants for each test, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the user journey.

  • 8 TalkTalk customers (4 female – 4 male) 

  • 8 non-TalkTalk customers (4 female – 4 male)

Open Card Sort Test

Rather than grouping pages based on what makes sense to the business, we used card sorting to allow users to organise our pages in a way that best reflects how they would interact with them.

In this exercise, participants were given a full list of ‘My Account’ dropdown menu items. They were free to group the pages into categories that felt intuitive to them and assign their own names to these groups.

The open card sort helped us to:

  • Understand how users naturally organise information

  • Improve the taxonomy of the menu items

  • Identify common grouping patterns to refine the overall navigation structure

Closed Card Sort Test

This study aimed to evaluate how well the proposed category structure, based on the open card sort results, supports the content.

Participants were given a set of predetermined category names and asked to organise the pages into these categories.

The closed card sort helped us to:

  • Assess how well the structure supports the content

  • Identify common grouping patterns to further refine the information architecture (IA)

Tree Test

After conducting a card sort, it’s important to follow up with a tree test to evaluate the proposed menu structure. This test assesses the hierarchy's performance in a real-world scenario by using common user tasks.

In this study, participants were presented with the navigation menu and tasks, and were asked to explore where they expected to find specific content within the tree.

The tree test provided insights into:

  • Successful task completion

  • Task failure rates

  • The paths participants took before selecting an answer

  • Time taken to complete each task

Presenting Project Results to the Online Team

After completing and analysing the three tests, we presented the results to the online team, which included the UX, UI, Product Management, Analytics, and Optimisation stakeholders. The goal of the presentation was to align the team with the test outcomes, discuss next steps, and gather any concerns or suggestions for improvements moving forward.

Results

This project was scheduled to begin development in September 2019. Unfortunately, the company closed its London HQ (business moved to Manchester), and I left the business before the project could be rolled out live.