IA Redesign, Emilie Calmels

The Brief

The business had a conversion problem. Users were landing on the website but not reaching the content and services that mattered most. The navigation had grown organically over time, and no one had stepped back to ask whether the structure still matched how users actually think and what they actually need.

My job was to lead the end-to-end process: diagnose the problem, align the organization around a direction, and design a new information architecture that would reduce friction and surface high-value content.

The Starting Point: A Workshop That Said Everything

Rather than starting with data or competitive research, I chose to open with a cross-functional stakeholder workshop. My reasoning was deliberate: in IA redesigns, you can have all the data in the world, but if the people closest to the product don't share a diagnosis, any proposed changes will stall.

The workshop brought together multiple teams to map and critique the existing navigation structure. What happened was more powerful than I expected. Every group independently reached the same conclusion: the information architecture was cluttered and unclear.

This convergence did two things. It validated that the problem was real and widely felt, not a matter of taste. And it created immediate organizational alignment around the need for change, which meant the redesign had genuine momentum from day one.

The workshop produced three clear directives: flatten the sitemap, prioritize high-interest content, and reduce the number of clicks required to reach key pages.

Cross-functional stakeholder workshop board showing user flow validation, target audience analysis, pain points, and improvement ideas — Stakeholder workshop output: user flow validation, target audience analysis, and improvement priorities

Step 1: Letting the Data Tell the Story

With stakeholder alignment secured, I moved into GA4 to pressure-test our assumptions with behavioral data. The goal was to understand which parts of the navigation users actually engaged with, and which were essentially invisible.

Three patterns emerged:

Under "Who We Serve," authors dominated traffic , other audience segments were being underserved by the current structure.
Under "What We Offer," traffic was heavily concentrated on journals and open access, while more specialized services had almost no visibility despite being genuinely valuable.
Across the "Who We Are" section, engagement was weak throughout.

The Hidden Gem

The most striking data point was what I'd call a hidden gem problem: the Impact Support Services page had just 196 sessions , among the lowest traffic of any page in the navigation.

But users who found it stayed for an average of 4 minutes 56 seconds, the longest engagement of any page on the entire site.

This was high-value content, clearly relevant to users who discovered it, but buried so deep in the structure that almost nobody was reaching it. That single data point became a core argument for restructuring the hierarchy.

Step 2: Benchmarking Against Competitors

To move from diagnosis to design direction, I conducted a structured competitive analysis across four major publishers: Elsevier, Springer Nature, Frontiers, and Wiley Online Library. I evaluated each across eight dimensions including global navigation focus, search architecture, audience hubs, submission paths, and accessibility.

The analysis revealed consistent patterns among best-in-class competitors:

Role-Based Entry Points

Clear pathways for different audience types, rather than one-size-fits-all navigation.

Task-First Navigation

Submission and discovery paths surfaced immediately, not buried in sub-menus.

These became the structural principles guiding the redesign, alongside consolidated audience hubs rather than scattered audience-specific pages.

The Outcome: A New Navigation Architecture

The research fed directly into a first-draft navigation structure that reorganized the site around five core pillars: Home, Publish With Us, Our Offers, About Karger, and Insights, with a persistent "Publish Your Paper" CTA elevated to global navigation.

The home page was redesigned to function as an orientation layer rather than a navigation item, highlighting key audiences and driving users toward the site's most strategic content.

The new structure applied the lesson of the hidden gem directly: instead of burying high-engagement specialized services in deep hierarchies, they were repositioned as visible, promoted entry points.

Reflection

What I found most valuable about this project was the sequencing. Starting with the workshop before touching data meant that by the time GA4 confirmed what everyone suspected, the organization was already ready to act. The data didn't have to convince anyone , it gave people permission to move.

A single page with 196 visits and around 4 minutes of engagement is a signal, not a failure , and knowing the difference is what separates navigation strategy from navigation cleanup.