Website Content Design and UX/UI - Improving SEO

OpenStax's user experience of navigating through different categories of textbooks relied on a filtering feature that served up books that fit under specific category filters; therefore, no unique links were created for separate subjects. We consulted with an SEO expert who advised us that a link-based way of navigating would help improve our SEO for high-impact pages such as the pages that housed our main product: the textbooks.

We jumped on the opportunity to improve both user experience including visual design, as well as our search engine optimization. In addition, we also implemented a new language toggle feature that allows textbook content to be viewed in both English and Spanish.

Goals/Requirements: • Remove filtering-based navigation and implement a link-based structure for navigating among categories of books • Implement a language toggle to allow users to access both English and Spanish books, easily • Improve the overall visual appeal to align with the brand's developing visual direction

We spoke with an SEO consultant who highlighted some untouched opportunities for us with our subject categorization.

I developed multiple directions for an improved navigation structure and developed prototypes of each, as well as one prototype that represented our current structure. I took each of these and performed user tests to gauge how users felt about using the different directions.

I presented prototype options to my client based on findings from user test results and SEO considerations, and together we decided on the option shown in my fully-fleshed out designs.

Using Figma and our design pattern library, I created high fidelity designs and continued to convert them into clickable experiences in Figma for further presentation purposes.