One of the major issues with the old Gold Medal website (aside from its overall design), was the site navigation. The original navigation was just one long list of items--it made it really difficult to find the products you needed and customer services frequently received calls regarding assistance navigating the site.
So in addition to my role in assisting with the overall design, I also really focused in on figuring out a new design for the navigation. Gold Medal has multiple target audiences accessing their page, and most of their customers were a bit older.
I started with the Four Diamonds site because I liked their horizontal navigation--but I wanted to find sites that used horizontal navigation to contain a lot of content. Websites like Sony and Honeywell had great examples of that, but the best sites that I found that handled this navigation treatment well were college websites.
College websites targeted multiple audiences (prospective students, current students, and parents) and I found multiple college websites that use a horizontal nav bar to hold their content in an organized way.
I brought my discovery to the rest of the team, and we used the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's website as our main source of inspiration moving forward.
The new site navigation used a horizontal style and instead of just listing text, we decided to use images due to our older target audience. This allowed Gold Medal's products to be easily found and would easily lead customers to purchase.
The sub-navigation was inspired by Sony's toggle navigation--you can see a portion of that above, but the toggle feature can only be seen within Gold Medal's intranet
Overall, our goal was to simplify the navigation and create a clean site that was easy for our customers to navigate and use on a daily basis.
