Rethinking how people find complex benefits information.
Challenge
Alight received consistent feedback that people struggled to find important benefits information within the existing navigation. Frequently accessed information—including forms, deductibles, insurance contacts, spending account balances, and time-off balances—could be difficult to locate.
A review of competitor experiences also revealed that Alight's navigation didn't align with many of the conventions users encountered on other websites, potentially making it harder for people to predict where information would be located.
We needed to rethink the information architecture around users' expectations: How could we organize a large and complex set of benefits information in a way that felt intuitive, predictable, and scalable?
Approach
We began by evaluating competitor navigation patterns and discussing our findings with stakeholders and leadership. Rather than reorganizing the existing menu based on internal assumptions, we used a series of studies to understand how users naturally grouped and looked for benefits information.
We first conducted an open card sort with 173 participants to understand how they naturally grouped existing menu items and the language they used to describe those groups. Recurring patterns allowed us to consolidate the information into three primary categories: Health & Insurance, Savings & Pension, and Work, Pay & Time.
Participants' groupings also suggested potential subcategories, so we conducted an additional card sort to determine how individual menu items should be organized within the broader structure.
Finally, we developed two navigation concepts and evaluated them with 109 participants, comparing time to selection, perceived difficulty, and overall preference.
A list of paired menu items - The darker the blue means the more frequently two terms were paired together.
My Contribution
I analyzed competitor navigation patterns, designed one of the card-sort studies and the comparative survey, analyzed findings, and presented recommendations to stakeholders and leadership.
Concept A
CONCEPT B
Insights & Impact
The research validated a three-category navigation structure and showed that adding subcategories made it easier for users to understand where information belonged. When we compared the two proposed concepts, Concept B generally resulted in faster selections and higher ease-of-use ratings, providing evidence for the direction that was ultimately implemented.
The impact extended beyond the mega menu itself. Because the navigation structure was used across Alight's benefits experiences, the new information architecture created cascading changes to how content was organized and accessed across the platform, including homepage navigation for the majority of client experiences and Alight's own homepage.
Following implementation, subsequent research showed improved findability, with users more easily locating the information they needed. Alight also saw a marked decrease in customer-support calls and negative feedback related to navigation, providing further evidence that the redesigned structure addressed the problems identified in the original research.
Summary of time on task and seqS FOR Savings & pension variations