Over time, Fivetran’s navigation had become a catch-all for marketing initiatives — a place where different teams added links to support product launches, campaigns, and thought leadership efforts. Without a defined framework for what warranted inclusion, the navigation expanded to more than 50 links, treated in the same way in the navigation and  competing for attention and visibility.

To understand the reality of what links were most important to users, I mapped every link in the navigation to click data. The findings confirmed the problem: many links had minimal clicks or traffic, and several of the underlying pages also saw low visits and shallow engagement. The volume of content was diluting visibility rather than enhancing discovery.

When I reviewed the content itself, it became clear that many pages overlapped in modules, messaging, and purpose, particularly within our analytics and industry categories. This differentiation not only created decision paralysis for users but also spread our messaging and our page views thin. The navigation had lost its focus. It wasn’t telling a coherent story about Fivetran’s offerings or guiding users toward clear next steps — instead, it was trying to serve multiple internal goals at once and overwhelming visitors in the process

I partnered closely with product marketing to audit the full sitemap, reviewing every page for relevance, traffic, and alignment with updated messaging and positioning. To manage the scope of this overhaul, we broke the work into two phases. In Phase 1, we consolidated and redirected redundant or underperforming pages into existing higher-level hub pages, such as Fivetran for Analytics and Fivetran for Industries — giving users a clearer entry point and reducing decision friction without waiting on net-new design work. Phase 2 focused on building out net-new hub page designs where consolidation required a more considered structure than a redirect could offer, allowing us to fully realize the updated messaging and positioning within the new page framework. Throughout this process, I worked with stakeholders across marketing, product, and web development to articulate the rationale behind each change — showing how consolidation would improve both user clarity and site performance over time.

While we needed to retain a number of links for business and stakeholder priorities, we found we could still make the experience far clearer through design. Through extensive UI explorations, it became clear that introducing visual hierarchy could better guide attention and communicate meaning. I designed varying levels of emphasis to help users quickly distinguish between core product offerings, use cases, and supporting resources. Short link descriptions provided space to clarify ambiguous terms in simple, user-centered language. The updated UI also created a new opportunity to feature dynamic, campaign-driven content.

After rounds of design, and reviewing with stakeholders, we ran unmoderated user testing with 15 participants spanning data analysts, engineers, and directors across industries. Participants reviewed high-fidelity navigation prototypes and completed findability and comprehension tasks. We found that 93% of users rated the navigation 4 or 5 out of 5 for clarity, participants described the structure as “organized how I’d expect” and “comprehensive without being overwhelming”, the addition of link descriptions was frequently cited as a major improvement. The study also revealed where we could improve terminology. Only one participant accurately defined “Extensibility Management” — confirming our suspicion that the language was too abstract. We updated it to “Extensibility” with simpler microcopy that explained its function.The testing also reinforced our decision to move support and changelog links to the footer; while technically useful, they didn’t belong in the primary discovery path for new visitors.

Alongside the visual and structural redesign, we focused on accessibility and technical refinements. We introduced a dark overlay and subtle shadow across the page content whenever the navigation was open, creating stronger contrast and visual focus for users. To maintain persistent access, the navigation was made sticky, ensuring it remained visible as users scrolled. Because the sticky navigation needed to appear over a wide range of background colors, we carefully validated color contrast ratios to meet WCAG AA compliance. We also refined micro-interactions to improve clarity. Simple indicators like carrots signifying expandable menus and straight links for direct navigation set clear expectations and minimized user confusion.

We ran an 11-week A/B test comparing the existing navigation against the new version and reached approximately 100,000 visitors. The new navigation with its persistent CTAs saw a +7% lift in signups. We also saw improvements in key engagement metrics. The redesigned variant generated +7% more traffic to high-value pages like /signup and /pricing, and increased visits to Product and Solutions pages by a similar margin. Overall, navigation engagement (link clicks) increased by 7.5%, showing a 20% lift in mobile interactions over the course of the test. These metrics validated meaningfully improvement in user understanding, conversion, and findability.