Redesigning Retail Tasking App Navigation Led to 500+% Increase in Usage of Key Features

Overview

Home Plate is an app for retail employees to manage store tasks (that are funded by dedicated labor hours) and stay updated on important operational messages. However, the app’s outdated design led to a significant usability challenge: the Info Message feature—a crucial channel for stakeholders to communicate to employees—was being overlooked. Employees were struggling to find these messages, leading to missed information and frustration. Additionally, the app’s outdated design and navigation didn’t align with modern mobile app standards, further affecting engagement and contributing to an overall disjointed experience across the company’s suite of apps.

As a Senior Product Designer on an Agile product team, I collaborated with another designer, our PM, engineers, and Operations stakeholders, as well as the Design Systems team, to modernize the navigation, which led to an immediate lift in visibility of key features without having to redesign the app up front. Through user research, a proactive application of a new design system pattern, and a more intuitive navigation structure, we increased engagement with the key Info Message feature, and additionally improved overall engagement with Home Plate.

The old app hamburger menu navigation was outdated and not user-friendly.

Challenges

  1. Discoverability of Info Messages: Employees had difficulty finding Info Messages, which led to missed updates and a lack of critical information.

  2. Outdated Menu: The hamburger menu itself wasn’t in line with current mobile design best practices—creating more friction for users—and required too many steps to access important features.

Research and Insights

To better understand employees’ priorities and mental models when it comes to store tasking and Home Plate, we conducted an in-person card sort test with a variety of employee roles. This allowed us to better organize the app's content and determine the most intuitive structure for navigation—ensuring that employees could easily access important sections without unnecessary friction.

Additionally, we conducted interviews and observations to gauge employees’ familiarity with features of the app important to the business, and understand employees’ own behaviors around store tasking. 

Solution

Rather than overhauling the entire app, we began with a change that we hypothesized would have the greatest impact with the least amount of engineering and design resources. If needed, we would explore additional hypotheses beyond revamping the navigation, but it was the quickest and most efficient first step.

  1. Redesigned Navigation: We moved away from the dated hamburger menu and introduced the more common and intuitive bottom navigation bar pattern. This change made it easier for users to access key features with fewer taps—and even brought awareness to features that employees didn’t know previously existed. This had the additional benefit of bringing Info Messages into focus, directly addressing stakeholder concerns about employees missing key messages.

  2. Design System Alignment: The new design more closely aligned the Home Plate app with the company’s Design System, ensuring consistency across the entire suite of apps that employees use in a given shift. In addition to a fresher, more polished look, it made navigation patterns more familiar across different applications, improving usability.

The new app design, with a modern bottom navigation

Outcome

Redesigning the navigation alone had a significant impact on user engagement:

  • 570% increase in daily average usage of Info Messages

  • 181% increase in the number of stores accessing Info Messages daily

  • 90% increase in usage of Tasks

  • 43% increase in usage of Metrics

With this one change, we were able to not only increase engagement with Info Messages and provide stakeholders with peace of mind that important messages were being seen, but also improved engagement with the app overall by making key features easier to find.

Conclusion

This project reinforced the power of research-driven decisions. By conducting just enough research and addressing solutions in a controlled way, we were able to tackle our stakeholders’ concern without overcommitting time or resources. The redesign not only addressed the immediate issues with Info Messages but also led to broader improvements in user engagement and satisfaction.

Lessons Learned

  • Small, incremental changes: We were able to directly measure the impact of the navigation on usability and discoverability because we only “changed” one thing at a time, rather than saving all of our ideas for release at once.

  • Share your research: Our intuition told us that a simple navigation modernization might be the answer, but until we were able to quantify our hypothesis via the card sort, and prove numbers that addressed our stakeholders’ immediate concern, they were skeptical.

  • Align with best practices: It can feel overwhelming to constantly reinvent app designs based on new patterns, but it made the app easier to use by way of familiarity. Additionally, as all apps across the business begin incorporating more consistent design system patterns, we’ll likely see increased efficiencies at scale.