Business Navigation · Hew Suber

01The stakes

Q4 2022

Page visit data from 4,786 enterprise accounts showed advertisers bypassing the homepage, bookmarking straight to the Reporting page (their analytics).

Enterprise agencies rated proficiency on the platform less transferable than Meta or Google.

Advertisers had replaced the navigation with bookmarks and muscle memory.

The ads platform's navigation had accumulated years of structural debt. Four independent dropdowns, Business, Create, Analytics, Ads, each organized around internal team structure rather than how advertisers actually think. A person had to already know which organizational bucket a tool fell into before they could find it. When people leave your product to Google how to use your product, navigation has failed.

Before · four dropdowns

Business
Create
Analytics
Ads
Each organized around an internal team

After · one MegaNav

01Create Content

02Manage Campaigns

03Analyze Performance

04Manage Business

Scanning one container is faster than hunting through four.

Four layers: UI, information architecture, taxonomy, context. Each demanding more organizational commitment than the last.

The framing that made it shippable in weeks

02The program

2023

I initiated the workstream and ran the first milestone as the de facto program lead. A product manager joined at the second milestone (M2).

Two formal IA studies with dendrogram analysis across 24 participants: Enterprise, SMB, Creator.

Two years, four milestones, no PM for the first one.

Scoping, measurement framework, experiment design, stakeholder alignment, launch. When a PM joined for M2, I redirected the freed capacity into navigation governance, a system nobody asked me to build, addressing a problem I saw coming.

Research

Competitive audits across Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok; an internal inventory of every tool and landing page: 12+ tools, 8 orgs, 4 team owners, 3 advertiser segments.

Measurement

Every surface classified as action or browse oriented, with a three-tier evaluation model, so every experiment signal was interpretable instead of ambiguous.

M1, MegaNav

Four independent dropdowns replaced with a single entry point opening to one unified multi-column container. UI-only change: same content, new container. Launched July 2023.

M2, structure + Shortcuts

Columns reorganized from platform taxonomy to jobs-to-be-done, with customizable Shortcuts as the personalization mechanism inside the universal structure.

Governance

Originated a 10-step submission process with weighted evaluation criteria for what belongs in global navigation, workshopped across six functions, then handed to the design program management team to own.

Competitive navigation audit across ad platforms. — **Fig. 01 · Competitive audit.** Side-by-side analysis of navigation patterns across ad platforms: entry points, hierarchy depth, and how tools are organized. Shown here, Pinterest surfaces mapped against their Meta Ads Manager equivalents.

Research synthesis: jobs-to-be-done grouped into workflow categories. — **Fig. 02 · Research synthesis.** Jobs-to-be-done prioritized on value and effort, then every page grouped into the four workflow categories that became the new columns.

Dendrogram clusters from card sorting across 24 participants. — **Fig. 03 · Dendrogram analysis.** Card sort clusters showing which pages participants perceived as belonging together. Across 24 participants, three distinct mental models: Enterprise oriented around campaign control, SMB around operational efficiency, Creators around content distribution.

03Shipped

Jul 2023 to Q1 2024

Managed advertisers pinned paid campaign surfaces; unmanaged pinned organic content. One feature generated the behavioral signal stated-preference research could only approximate.

M2 showed a 1.61% dip in campaign creates. I contextualized the tradeoff and recommended a specific mitigation before ramping to 100%.

Ship the container first. Restructure the architecture second. Personalize third. Activate fourth.

M1 replaced four dropdowns with one unified container, reaching general availability by Q1 2024. M2 reorganized the columns around advertiser jobs and added customizable Shortcuts: pin the surfaces you use most, drag to reorder, selections persist. Managed advertisers, the revenue generating segment, engaged more with the surfaces closest to spend: Reporting up 18%, Custom Reports up 18%, Create Campaign up 9%.

Fig. 04 · IA restructuring (M2). Columns shift from internal taxonomy to advertiser workflow. Hovering reveals in-product descriptions authored with Content Design.

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Fig. 05 · Shortcuts (M2). Customizable navigation entry points. People pin their most used surfaces, drag to reorder, and see selections persist across sessions.

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−25%

Nav opens, visits held

+31%

Managed analytics engagement

2,600+

Advertisers adopted Shortcuts

8

Orgs aligned on one nav

“I live and breathe in the MegaNav. It is just the best. Everything is so easy to find. It is very robust.”

Enterprise advertiser Unsolicited, during an unrelated research session

04The governance

2024 onward

Design leadership held the platform to a one-size-fits-all IA while research showed three segment mental models.

The governance system kept operating after my involvement ended. That was the intent.

Teams kept making ad hoc requests to add surfaces to the top level. Without criteria for what belongs in the navigation, the work would erode within months of shipping. The submission process and rubric now protect the navigation's coherence without me in the room, and the measurement framework keeps every new signal interpretable.

Rather than fighting the one-size-fits-all constraint, I organized around the workflow patterns every segment shared and designed Shortcuts as the personalization pressure valve.

The navigation advertisers stopped working around.