GLOBAL NAVIGATION REDESIGN

The brief from leadership was to imagine what Patagonia's path to purchase could be at its best. The vision was an experience akin to shopping with a trusted outdoor gear expert: intuitive discovery that connects customers to the right products for their preferences and goals, immersive storytelling that highlights quality, responsibility, and real-world use, and personalized recommendations based on sport, environment, and budget.

Customers would shop confidently with guidance, authentic storytelling, and seamless navigation — making informed decisions while feeling connected to Patagonia's mission. This was the north star. Our job was to figure out where to start.

To pressure-test the vision against reality, we anchored the discovery work in three primary sources: Fullstory behavioral data, a Brand Health Report, and a SWOT analysis gathered by the product manager.

We organized customer friction points into natural groupings, quantifying where pain was most intense across six clusters: Understanding Gaps, Filtering & Sorting, Homepage & Discovery Barriers, Versatility/Longevity Confidence Fatigue, Personalization, and Guided Shopping. Cross-referencing these with funnel data gave us a prioritized view of where to focus.

• Navigation friction was the highest-impact, most directly addressable problem in the funnel
• 42% of customers don't consider Patagonia for exercise or training — a reach problem rooted in discoverability
• 33% of users drop off immediately after the homepage — a flow problem the navigation could directly address
• A fixed taxonomy foundation would reduce complexity for future work

This finding gave the team — and leadership — a concrete, evidence-backed rationale for where to focus.

With the structural direction roughed out through napkin sketching and early cross-functional working sessions, the next step was to translate the two most promising concepts into something testable. The audit findings, Baymard best practices, and internal alignment with engineering and merchandising had surfaced a core tension that sketches alone couldn't resolve: should customers enter the catalog through gender — the familiar, convention-aligned pattern — or through sport and activity, which more closely reflected how Patagonia customers actually think about what they buy?

Rather than resolve that tension through internal debate, I brought both directions forward as fully realized concepts.

Starting from the napkin sketches, I developed two distinct lo-fi wireframe directions — one gender-focused, one sport-focused — exploring how each would handle the same core navigation challenges: L1 structure, sub-category depth, activity entry points, and the placement of brand content. The lo-fi phase was about stress-testing the logic of each structure before investing in visual execution.

From there, I brought both directions to hi-fi wires and built interactive prototypes for each — giving usability test participants a realistic experience to react to rather than an abstract concept to evaluate.

The two directions were brought to hi-fi and prototyped for user testing. Below are the final concepts taken into the study.

Before running full usability testing, I designed a survey to collect quantitative signal on how customers prefer to shop — and which navigation structure would help them find things faster. 42 participants completed the survey.

The data surfaced a revealing tension: 62% said they shop based on a specific activity or sport, yet when presented with the two navigation concepts directly, 60% said the gender-focused menu would help them find things faster. Customers default to familiar patterns even when their actual behavior is activity-driven. This told us that supporting both entry points wasn't a compromise — it was the right call.

With survey data in hand, I ran a multi-method usability study to validate the redesigned navigation against real customer behavior before development handoff.

What we tested: a prototype of the redesigned navigation menu for Patagonia.com. Goal: understand how users explore, shop, and interpret the navigation experience.

Focus areas: task completion across categories, collections, sports, and brand content; discovery of new products and brand content; label clarity and feature expectations.

The survey and usability testing data pointed clearly to a hybrid architecture — a gender-first navigation structure that also supports sport and activity as a parallel entry point. This wasn't a split-the-difference decision. The data showed that customers have genuinely different mental models, and the right system needed to meet all of them.

The final navigation leads with Men's, Women's, and Kids as primary L1 anchors — the familiar, fast path for customers who know what they want. Sports are elevated as a parallel top-level entry point for customers browsing by what they do. Brand content — Activism, Stories, Guides — moves out of the shopping path entirely and into contextual placements where it earns attention without creating friction.