the politics of navigation

The Politics f Navig tion

Stuart Maxwell@stumax turninggrille.comExperience Architect at REI

#ias15

SLOW DOWN!

1 The Politics of Navigation - final - May 31, 2015

1938

77 years ago, Lloyd and Mary Anderson


Matt Peyton / AP Images

were a couple of avid amateur mountain climbers in Seattle.

Lloyd was looking for a high-quality climbing axe that didn’t cost a day’s wages, and he found what he was looking for in this:


the Austrian Akadem Pickel. After importing and selling a handful of these to his climbing buddies, he and Mary and 21 of their friends started a cooperative so they could sell more high-quality climbing gear to other amateur climbers.


photo by REI

They named this co-op Recreational Equipment, Incorporated, or REI.


1970s

In the 1970s, REI expanded its offerings from climbing and backpacking gear to other outdoor activities,


photo by REI

opened its first retail store, and became what it is today:


Photo by daveynin - http://flic.kr/p/oGPQ54

a national retailer of outdoor gear and apparel with over 140 physical retail stores


and a very successful online store.

But while REI has expanded to sell kayaks, standup paddle boards, running shoes, car racks, and luggage,


the company has always acknowledged its roots in climbing. That’s why ice axes are installed as door handles on almost all of REI's retail stores,


distribution centers, and headquarters buildings.


2014

Which is why, in 2014, some customers (and quite a few employees) were surprised to learn that,


Camp & Hike Climb Cycle Fitness Run Paddle Snow Travel Men Women Kids Footwear More+

as part of an A/B test on REI.com, “Climb” was moved from the main global navigation menu


Camp & Hike Cycle Fitness Run Paddle Snow Travel Men Women Kids Footwear More+

to a submenu.


–Actual REI customer comment

“what happened to Climbing as a category in the top navigation?

are you kidding?”

This is an actual comment from an actual REI customer.

Now, it seemed perfectly reasonable to consider – to test – removing “Climb” from the global nav. The analytics clearly show that it doesn’t perform as well as other navigation options, and since space is at a premium, why not remove it from the top level and open up room for something else?


But this is a company that has climbing axes on all of its doors.

Removing “Climb” from the nav sent a message (however unintentional) that maybe REI’s focus had changed. Maybe we didn't care as much about climbing anymore. But our customers – at least some subset of our customers (and many of our employees, too) – didn’t care what the analytics said. They cared about their beloved activity. They cared about tradition.


Camp & Hike Cycle Fitness Run Paddle Snow Travel Men Women Kids Footwear More+

The A/B test is over.


“Climb” has been restored to the global nav and all is right with the world. But this event foreshadowed the story I'm going to tell you today.


1. I’m political and so are you 2.Not everyone thinks like an IA 3.Count the votes 4.Information is power 5.Influence early and often 6.Strive for consensus

It's the story of a major redesign of REI.com, and the six big lessons it taught me about the politics of navigation.


1I’m political,and so are you

Lesson One: I’m political and so are you.

Now, when I say politics,


– Choosing in Groups by Michael C. Munger and Kevin M. Munger

“Politics is choosing and acting in groups.”

I mean it the way political scientists Michael and Kevin Munger define it: politics is choosing and acting in groups.


Photo by NewsHour - http://flic.kr/p/5h6Q8C

If you think of politics as this …


Photo by Robert Scarth - http://flic.kr/p/deguN

or if the word "Machiavellian" springs to mind,


Photo by arboltsef - http://flic.kr/p/tJpQF

or if you think of the backstabbing and manipulation of "office politics", well, join the club. That's how I usually think about it, too, and it really kind of turns me off.

I've spent most of my life believing that I'm not a political animal and wanting to avoid politics at all costs.



“Politics is choosing and acting in groups.”

Reading the Mungers' definition has reframed politics for me. It helped me see that I am political. In fact, I can't *not* be political.


Photo by DonkeyHotey - http://flic.kr/p/aprH6X

Because politics is a political debate, of course,


Photo by Jeffrey - http://flic.kr/p/qHPHH6

but it's also a design meeting


Photo by MyDigitalSLR - http://flic.kr/p/6Lof3x

and a one-on-one. Politics is how we make decisions in groups.


Photo by soukup - http://flic.kr/p/8RHg98

It takes a lot of forms, including some pretty mundane ones. And if we want to be good information architects, we need to embrace politics. Not to manipulate for any sinister reason, but to persuade others that what we have to say is worth listening to. That what we suggest is worth doing.

Let me set the stage for you so that I can explain how I came to this way of thinking. Let's go aaaaalll the way back


February 2014

to February 2014. Remember those days, kids? We were so young then.


Photo by Kelly Kline - http://flic.kr/p/mH3JqA

The president was Barack Obama,


Photo by Josh Lackey - http://flic.kr/p/jJie9b

and the Seattle Seahawks had just won the Super Bowl. Not thrown it away at the last minute from the one yard line when they could’ve just handed it to Marshawn Lynch, I mean he’s your best offensive weapon, what are you thinking? I mean, not that I'm bitter. Football, am I rite?

But those were happier, more innocent times, February of 2014.


Anyway, in February of 2014, this was the global navigation for REI.com.


1996

When the website was first launched in 1996, it looked like this. We have a few links in the left rail to our product catalog and so on.


2014

Today, it's the same idea, just more complex. Essentially, the site today is what it has always been: a paper catalog translated for the web.


Digital RetailMarketing

Public Affairs

REI Adventures Outdoor Programs,Marketing

The gray tabs in the global navigation basically map to business lines. The Digital Retail division sell products. REI Adventures sells trips. Outdoor Programs sells classes and events, and so on.


Products

Trips Classes, Events, How-to Articles, Videos

Blog PostsStewardship

Reports

Of course, content is siloed in these tabs, too. There are some links between content, but if you want to find our help articles, you go through the Learn tab.


There are occasional rumblings about a radical rethinking of the nav, but nothing ever comes of it. Because the fact is, although the navigation is far from perfect, it is actually usable for the one person that matters: our customer.


$2.2 billionREI’s 2013 revenue

In 2013, REI drove $2.2 billion in revenue.


$2.2 billionREI’s 2013 revenue

Online accounts for ~25%

The online business drives a little less than 25% of that, and we're the fastest growing part of REI. We're doing something right.


Digital RetailMarketing

Public Affairs

REI Adventures Outdoor Programs,Marketing

And the navigation is also successful from the perspective of internal politics. Every customer-facing internal group is represented in the global nav. Everyone has their slice of the pie.


Lots of clicks Some clicks Just a few clicks

Sure, some slices of pie are pretty small if you count how many clicks they get, but at least they're represented.

But back in February of 2014, we've got a new CEO and a new brand identity and it's clear we need to do more.


Products

Because not only does REI sell outdoor gear and clothing,


Articles

we have lots of great articles


Videos

and videos that tells you how to get the best use out of that gear and clothing.


Classes

We also offer classes


Trips

and adventure travel. In fact,


–REI’s mission statement

“To inspire, educate, and outfit for a lifetime of outdoor adventure

and stewardship.”

it's in our mission statement that we're supposed to inspire and educate people about the outdoors, not just to sell products.


Unfortunately, our website just isn't as good at the inspire and educate part as it is the selling part. Customers who take a class or go on a trip with us, or who read one of our how-to articles, are our best customers, but our website makes it hard to serve those customers well. Senior leadership calls for a site redesign to address these challenges.


July 2014

So, in July of 2014, a design agency is hired to conduct the redesign.


The Agency’s mandate• Differentiate us

• Dump the silos

• Support the mission (“inspire, educate, and outfit”)

Their mandate is to define a future REI.com that:* Differentiates us from our competitors* Breaks down the silos of information on the site* Supports the mission of REI: to inspire and educate, as well as outfit


Site merch

UX

Visual

IA

The internal team

At this point, I’m assigned to be the IA representative on REI's internal team working with the agency. My job will be to represent the in-house perspective on navigation and site structure.

Early meetings with the agency are really positive. They're intelligent and creative, and it feels like a match made in heaven.


September 2014

But in September, after several weeks of stakeholder interviews, primary research, and brainstorming, the agency returns to REI to present their proposal for the new site. Among other things,


the agency proposes a new navigation that is drastically stripped down, with most functionality moved into a hamburger menu. This would be our global nav for desktop and tablet and would easily adapt to the smartphone breakpoint.

There are no mega menus; the heavy lifting we currently depend on the global nav to do would have to be done elsewhere.


We're going from this...


to this.


The Agency does offer an alternative, with a limited number of menu options. But this just raises more questions. Chiefly: what would be in those placeholders? As you can see here, the agency didn't make a choice. They figured that we could eventually find the six and only six navigation options to represent who we are and what we sell.


Proposed Option 1

Proposed Option 2

Current

Now I'm getting a little concerned. What I thought might be a fun assignment was starting to make knots form in my belly. I was (partly) responsible for the navigation of a site that drives upwards of $450 million per year, and we were talking about making a radical change in the primary way our customers find products. Instinctively, I thought that the new design was too restrictive, too pared back, too far a jump from where we were, but at the time, I wasn’t able to articulate why.

I pushed back with the agency: can't we talk about expanding this out, maybe to 10 or 12? The agency dug in their heels. They really believed that zero was the right number of global navigation links for us.They thought that eight was a compromise. Nine was out of the question, never mind 12.


Now, look, we’re the client, right? Supposedly, whatever we say goes. The problem is that, as the client, we’re many voices that have to speak as one. As we’ll see a little later on, there wasn’t enough agreement internally about the proposed nav to stop it from being seriously considered for our new site.

It dawned on me that if I had any hope of avoiding a potential disaster, I would need to a) develop my take on the proposed nav and have some good reasons for objecting to it; and b) start persuading and influencing my colleagues at REI and at the agency.

In other words, I would need to get political.


2Not everyone thinks like an IA

Lesson Two: Not everyone thinks like an Information Architect.

So, our small internal team at REI begin poring over the design and trying to understand its implications.

And, look, I'm going to mainly discuss the debate around the desktop and tablet nav from here on out. If you're wondering about smartphone nav, just rest assured that we were taking a mobile-first approach, and we were pretty well aligned on the nav for our smallest breakpoint. But desktop and tablet are still important viewports for us, and that's where the most interesting discussions took place.


So we’re reviewing the design, and I am truly conflicted about the proposed navigation. I love new and shiny things, and I'm a fan of minimalist design. But I'm also a pragmatist. I know that our customers need to find things, and they mainly find things by using our navigation.

During stakeholder interviews, before seeing this proposed design, I had told the agency just that.


Doesn't Search 60%

Searches 40%

Most of the year

1. 60% of our customers navigate; they don't search.


Doesn't Search 80%

Searches 20%

December

During the holidays (when we do a large part of our yearly business), that number is 80%.


Purchasing (11%)

Evaluating (23%)

Just browsing (29%)

Researching (32%)

Other (5%)

2. When customers visit REI.com 1. Roughly a third are browsing with no intent to purchase anything 2. Only 11% say they know exactly what they want to buy when they come to the site.

So, 90% of our customers don’t have a well-articulated finding task.


20,000+ products 2,000+ categories

3. We have a broad product catalog, and our navigation needs to support that.


–REI’s mission statement

“To inspire, educate, and outfit for a lifetime of outdoor adventure

and stewardship.”

4. We need to present inspirational and educational content (articles, videos, trips, classes, and so on) alongside our products, because this is what we’re all about.


So, the majority of our customers depend on the navigation in order to find stuff on our site. The agency had this information. So why were they insisting on this slimmed-down navigation? Why couldn't they see that the new design would force us to narrow the possible entry points to the site, which could impact sales? And why did they think it was okay that the REI perspective was missing?


Photo by iwona_kellie - http://flic.kr/p/7WbppX

I mean, if the ice axes on our doors reinforce who we are as a company,


then so does what we choose to present in the global nav.

Why couldn't the agency see this like I did? Well, they weren't looking at this like an IA, for one thing. They were approaching the problem from a different perspective.

I needed understand their perspective and start finding some common ground. Over the course of several meetings I was able to tease out the assumptions behind the proposed navigation.

What I figured out was that support for the minimalist navigation was based on two primary misconceptions:


MisconceptionHiding navigation options

simplifies the experience and reduces confusion

First that hiding navigation options automatically simplifies the experience and reduces confusion.

This is one I hear from visual designers a lot. And I understand where they're coming from. In visual design, just like in good writing, concision is considered state of the art. Many visual designers (especially those working in a modern design idiom) try to eliminate lines, colors, and clutter, to reduce visual overload to a streamlined and minimalist style. It's only natural that they'd see text as just a lot of ugly, squiggly lines and think, "Let's just clear some of that out of the way."

They're not thinking of the text as functional, they're thinking of it as a design element. They argue that taking away text makes the design simpler.


Aesthetic Simplicity vs.

Functional Simplicity

I think that there's a difference between Aesthetic Simplicity and Functional Simplicity. Aesthetic simplicity is the domain of visual design. It’s all about white space and lack of clutter. Functional simplicity is the domain of usability. It's the idea that an interface is easy to understand and use. Aesthetic simplicity can help reduce an overly complicated interface into something that's far more useful. But I believe there's a crossover point where the interface has been so pared down that it becomes harder to use.


In the eyes of visual designers, long lists of navigation options are just so much visual clutter. As an IA, I believe that long lists of navigation options (within reason and when properly grouped) are easier to use.


Aesthetic Simplicity vs.

Functional Simplicity

The balance point between aesthetics and function is what we are striving for in the navigation design. The agency had made the nav simpler visually, but they hadn't made it easier to use.


Misconception

People will just search.

The other misconception that was often used to justify visual design decisions was that customers who didn't see what they wanted in the navigation would just use the search box instead.

That'd be nice if it were true, but I don't believe it is. We didn't have to look much farther than our own analytics to start debunking this one:


Doesn't Search 60%

Searches 40%

Most of the year

Remember this slide? 60% of our customers browse the site. They won't use the site search.


Doesn't Search 80%

Searches 20%

December

And during the holidays, that number is 80%. And it's not hard to understand why that might be: During the holidays, many customers are shopping for other people, so they don't know exactly what they need to find. Perhaps they're looking to be inspired. Perhaps they don't know what to search for.


– Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender

“Search requires that we know what we want and have the words to describe our needs.”

As Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender point out in their book *Search Patterns*, “Search requires that we know what we want and have the words to describe our needs.” So during the holidays, when a lot of our customers don't know exactly what they want, they use the navigation. So the idea that site search can make up for a lack of navigation is a non-starter.


Photo by Megan Lawrie Cole - http://flic.kr/p/2FzaPg

Now, look. I want to be clear that it wasn’t just the agency that had these misconceptions. There were also a lot of people within REI that I had to convince.

But now, at least, I had identified the major points of contention. Now I needed to get the rest of the group to see things my way. I needed to figure out the political pressure points where I could make my case and steer the global navigation decisions in the way I thought best.


3Count the votes

Which brings me to: Lesson Three: Count the Votes


October 2014

So, it’s October of 2014.


We’re in a big meeting room, the biggest one on campus. It’s a few weeks after the agency had proposed the minimal nav, and now they’re back at REI headquarters to present the new design to a group that includes our division VP and directors and managers from other divisions.

The Agency delivers a killer presentation. The site is beautiful, it’s different, and everyone in the room is enthusiastic about the design.


While The Agency shows an early preview of the visual design for the site, they show the new minimalist navigation just as you see it here, as an abstract concept.

One by one, people give their feedback. I'm attuned to the issues with the navigation, so I'm listening to what people say about the global nav:


Will customers find our products?

Merchant

The site merchant speaks up first. She’s responsible for what product gets sold on the site and depends on the navigation to prompt a customer to head down the purchase path. "Are people going to be able to find our products with this new nav?" she asks. "And how do we promote new things, products we want to feature?"


This changes the way REI represents itself.

Merchant Marketer

* This is the Marketer. He’s concerned with the company’s image. "I'm nervous that we're changing the way REI represents itself. This new navigation... it's one of the first things you see... Are new visitors going to understand what we're all about?"


Some customers want a richer experience.

Merchant Marketer Market Researcher

* The Market Researcher has done a ton of research on who our customer is and how they shop. "This navigation will appeal to our, you know, hardcore gear heads." She says. "But some of our customers want more context, a richer experience."



Senior Leader

Are we going far enough?

* The senior leader doesn't take a strong stand on the global nav specifically. Instead, he's "concerned that the design won’t go far enough. Will REI stand out amongst our competitors?"


This is probably going to hurt conversion.


Senior Leader Web Analyst

* The Web Analyst says "We can remove some of these navigation links, no problem. They get very little traffic. But some of these get a lot of clicks. We're probably going to hurt conversion if we do this."


Too much blah blah blah. We need more white space.



Visual Designer

* The visual designer claims, "I just want this to look great. We have too many lists. Lots of blah blah blah. We need more white space."


Let’s put this in front of customers.



Visual Designer UX Designer

* The UX designer says, "So, we won't know if this works until we test it. Let's just put this in front of customers and find out if they know where to click."


Natural search traffic might drop.



Visual Designer UX Designer SEO

* The SEO points out that "If we remove the mega menus, we could see a sharp drop in natural search traffic. Google won't understand what the site is about and how to rank our pages."




Visual Designer UX Designer SEO Developer

Too much technical debt.

* The developer warns "Yeah, I'm not sure how we're going to do this this year. It's going to take a long time. We've got a lot of technical debt to work through."




Visual Designer UX Designer SEO Developer Me

WTF!?

* And there's me. And I’m all, like, "What the...?! What...? No way are we doing a hamburger menu for the global nav. Get outta here.” Okay, I didn't really say that. I thought it.




Visual Designer UX Designer SEO Developer

I'm not convinced.

Me

What I said was, "I'm not convinced that this hamburger icon is going to work. You're asking the rest of the design to pick up a lot of slack."





This meeting was a revelation. I thought of myself as the person responsible for the nav. And then I realized:





so did everyone else. In that moment, I realized that my job wasn't just about trying to do good information architecture. It was also about playing politics. So that I *would have the opportunity to* do good IA.

So I started to wonder: How could I convince my team to push back on the agency for some major changes to the navigation?


~

+

- -

-

~ ~

~~ -

I reflected back on the meeting and counted up the votes for the navigation in my head. There were four of us who were against the proposed navigation, one for it, and five who were neutral. Thing is, those neutrals may as well have been for the navigation, because they weren’t motivated enough about it to advocate for a change. But the case wasn’t hopeless. I just needed to convert two or three people to my side.


+

- - ~-

-

~ ~

~~ -

I had thought that my colleagues on the REI team working with the agency would be with me, but they were split or indifferent.


~

+

- -

-

~ ~

~~ -

The folks from marketing turned out to be unexpected allies. I had figured they would care more about visual design than about functionality, but they turned out to be pretty insightful about the utility of a robust navigation. Now, their opinions carried a little less weight since their division wasn't sponsoring the project. But their arguments gave me some ammunition. I just needed to come up with a bit more evidence and I'd have a strong case.

Which is what I did in…


4Information is power

Lesson 4: Information is Power

One of the persistent arguments I had to counter was the idea that REI should copy some design element from another site. I used this tactic myself.


For instance, I wanted us to try something like what Lowe's does in their navigation. They've got this simplified, task-based navigation that basically asks, "what are you here for? Products? Click here. How-to content? Here you go." It sure looked like they were trying to solve the same problems we had. Like us, they have a broad catalog of products and lots of non-product content. Trouble is, I heard through the grapevine that their nav wasn't performing to their expectations, and they might be considering a redesign. So it didn't make sense to go that push to hard for this. But it did lead me to this insight:


–Stuart Maxwell

“Just because a design is publisheddoesn’t mean it’s performing.”

Just because a design is published doesn’t mean it’s performing. I kept coming back to this one over and over during the design process. A lot of the discussion around design direction revolved around designs that someone observed out in the wild. And of course this is a good way to get inspiration. But it's not okay to look at designs uncritically because unless you've tested them or you're looking at the analytics, you don't know whether they're actually effective.

There’s a corollary to this observation, too:


–Stuart Maxwell

“Just because a design element is effective in one context doesn’t

mean it’ll be effective in another.”

Just because a design element is effective in one context doesn’t mean it’ll be effective in another. REI has a broad product catalog, a variety of service offerings, and lots of non-product content. Not every site is like that.


So, here's a site that one of the designers sent around saying "we should do what these guys do: a really simple navigation.” So, Betabrand is a boutique clothing site. Looks great, doesn't it?


24

But let's just see how many men's jackets they have. I can count 'em up: 24 jackets in three categories: blazers, jackets, and hoodies.


558

How many men's jackets do you think REI carries? 558. Men’s jackets. Insulated, Casual, Snow, Rain, Fleece, Soft-Shell, Running Jackets, and Wind Shells.Betabrand is a cool site. But it's not an example for REI. Companies with a smaller and narrower catalog can get by with different navigation approaches.

And, you know, it's up to IAs to point this stuff out, because this isn't about visual design, it's about information design. If all you're concerned with is how the site is laid out and how it looks, and if you can ignore the realities of your inventory, or tell yourself that the search box is sufficient for wayfinding... basically, if you can ignore the realities of information-seeking behavior, you can design some beautiful sites that might not work. It's up to us as IAs to address these kinds of issues head on, to make sure that our sites are beautiful **and** smart.


November 2014

In November 2014, support for the minimalist navigation was picking up steam, and I was becoming increasingly convinced that it was a bad idea. I thought we needed at least 12 to 15 navigation options immediately visible in the global nav on desktop and tablet.


I had been gathering research over the past month to help make my case, including conducting our own research.


We used Optimal Workshop's Treejack test to analyze three variants on our then-current global nav. We found that there was a


50

62.5

75

87.5

100

Default Modified Expanded

787575

slight uptick in overall success using the variant with the most navigation options. That variant also dramatically outperformed the default navigation for 4 of 10 tasks.


The more navigation options we showed, the more successful

our users were

Let me just underscore that. The more navigation options we showed to our test users, the better the navigation performed.All this research helped me articulate some overarching principles of navigation.


What’s the global nav for?• Let customers find stuff

• Tell customers what they can find

• Assert a perspective

I reckoned that global navigation does three things: It lets customers find stuff, of course, but it also tells customers about what they *can* find. At REI, this is especially important, since we cater to a wide range of skill levels; not everyone knows each category deeply enough to understand what it contains. Finally, the global navigation asserts a perspective. It defines a mental model about the information space. It says "this is how REI thinks about the world of outdoor activities." Whatever decisions we made about the navigation would have to support these principles.

So, if information is power, now I had some. I had my point of view, I had my evidence, and now I needed to play a little politics to make the case for a better global navigation.


5Influence early and often

Lesson Five: Influence early and often

So, politics is about how we make decisions in groups. And to get a group to coalesce around a point of view, we need to use persuasion. We need to influence each other to see the world a certain way.

Here's the truth: over the course of nine months, in every meeting that I attended about the redesign, I had an opportunity to have input about the design in general and navigation in particular, but I often failed to do so, because I didn't understand the principle of influencing early and often.


Too much text!

In these meetings, someone might say, "there's too much text",


Get rid of the long lists.

or "let's get rid of lists",


No left rails!

or "no left rails". Each time these statements went unchallenged,


Why?

the group point of view about information architecture solidified a bit more. Later, when it came time to try to change those opinions, it was harder because they had formed the foundation of the redesign work. And there was already a house that was being built on top of that foundation.

Eventually, I learned to speak up at every opportunity. It didn't have to be challenging or confrontational. Sometimes I just needed to ask a question. "Why should we get rid of lists?" or "No left rails, huh? How will that work?" When I did that, one of three things would happen:1. I'd get an opportunity to counter a mis-conception; 2. My colleagues' arguments would collapse because they had no substance to them;3. I'd hear something that I hadn't thought of before, and I'd get a chance to work on my point of view.

It would take time to make my case. It became a game of patience, and to play it, I drew from two pieces of advice I learned from Mike Auzanne and Mark Horstman of the Manager Tools podcast:


–Mike Auzanne and Mark Horstman, Manager Tools

Shot across the bow

Not every argument has to be resolved right away. Sometimes it's enough to just challenge a point of view. Auzanne and Horstman call this the "shot across the bow". The idea comes from naval warfare. When two enemy ships are in the same area, and one of them fires a shell across the bow of the other one so that it narrowly misses, the message is: I missed on purpose, but I’m within range and can hit you whenever I want.

In the politics of navigation, it works like this:


No long lists!

Visual Designer: "We need to get rid of these long lists in the navigation."


We need lists!

Me: "I actually think these are kind of important. We have a lot of things to sell, and we need to show that."


Make ‘em shorter!

Visual Designer: You need to come up with shorter lists! Just combine some categories or something."


Shot across the bow

So now I have a choice to make. I can pursue the conversation as long as it's productive. But I don't have to say anything else right now. I don't argue, I just smile and let the conversation move along. The important part is that I didn't let an assumption pass unchallenged. I've delivered the shot across the bow. I can press the point at a more strategic time.


–Mike Auzanne and Mark Horstman, Manager Tools

Pre-wiring the meeting

The other trick for influencing your peers is something Auzanne and Horstman call "pre-wiring the meeting". The main idea here is pretty simple: don't wait until a meeting to discuss potentially contentious topics. Instead, look for opportunities -- formal or otherwise -- to discuss your point of view with your peers.

This really works for me because I'm an introvert, and I tend to be a lot better in one-on-one or small group conversations than in a bigger discussion. So as I got more sophisticated about the politics of the redesign, I'd find opportunities to have hallway conversations, lunchtime chats, or one-on-one meetings with my peers in order to bend their ears about the navigation.

This is kind of like counting up the votes in congress so that you don't bring a bill to the floor until you know that it will pass. Pre-wiring the meeting means making sure you know what to expect when you walk into the room.


December 2014

Eventually, I started making headway. By December of 2014, I had convinced the project owner and the members of the internal team that the minimal nav needed to be replaced by something more suited to our needs.


6Strive for consensus

Finally, lesson six: Strive for consensus. In January 2015, the agency called a meeting to hash out our differences about the navigation once and for all. The meeting went about as well as I could have hoped. I had prepared the ground by continuing to speak up about navigation early and often in meetings with the agency. And, of course, I had been paying attention to internal politics to build a consensus point of view within REI. It paid off; at this meeting, my REI colleagues were often making my points about the navigation even before I could.

To their great credit, the agency really listened and heard our arguments. Later, they returned with a much-improved take on the navigation design, one that met our requirements and showed us some new possibilities we hadn't thought of. It was, ultimately, a triumph of consensus-driven decision-making.



Consensus builds: 1. Information 2. Legitimacy

In their book *Choosing in Groups*, Michael and Kevin Munger say that there are two reasons to use voting as a means of decision-making: to get better information and to lend legitimacy to the final decision. While voting and consensus aren't exactly the same thing, they're close enough to enjoy similar benefits. The drive for consensus flushed out the various opinions in the group and required each of us to present convincing arguments for why we believed what we did. We shared information and changed minds as a result. I even softened my stance on having the hamburger menu in the global nav, because I heard the arguments and examined the alternatives and I can wholeheartedly support where we ended up.


vs

And here’s the agency’s final design, up top. This is what it boiled down to for the global nav: 13 items instead of 8. On the surface, it seems like it's a pretty minor thing to put so much energy into arguing over, but I think it's actually pretty significant. Not least because 13 was the number that we believed in. 8 menu items was an arbitrary number meant to support an aesthetic choice. 13 menu items was well-researched, tested, and reinforced by our previous experience and our understanding of our customers.


So here we are today The new navigation design (coming to production later this year) is a mix of old and new. Will it survive in the real world? I don’t know, but I'm as confident in it as I can be at this point. It's time to give it a try.


Conclusion


One of the reasons I love the ice axes on REI's doors is because they imply that there's a journey ahead, one filled with challenge. At REI we’ve always believed that challenging journeys in the real world are well worth the effort. While hardly as heroic, I believe the challenges of negotiating the politics of navigation are also well worthwhile.


The navigation on our site says something about us. It says something about how we look at the world.


It can say we're comprehensive but siloed,


or that we're coldly efficient,


or that these things are important to us, and these are the things we know are important to you, our customers.

Getting the navigation to say something meaningful, to wrangle many voices into one non-verbal statement, is a political struggle.

Politics doesn't have to be machiavellian, and it doesn't have to be sinister. It can be thoughtful, and civil, and empathetic.

But it has to happen. And you have to be a part of it, because politics is happening all the time, whether you choose to engage with it or not. Better to engage with it on your own terms.


1. I’m political and so are you 2.Not everyone thinks like an IA 3.Count the votes 4.Information is power 5.Influence early and often 6.Strive for consensus

So find your allies and hold them close, and influence the rest at every opportunity. Gather your information and drive for consensus. As an IA, you're a necessary and vital player in the politics of navigation. I wish you luck in negotiating your own political challenges. Thank you so much for listening.


Thank you

Louise Maxwell

Andy Fitzgerald

Bram Wessel

Michael Adcock

Max Eichbaum

Kim Field

Dena Gazin

Isaac Pattis

Luke Warwick

Team IAS15

Special thanks to


Questions? Comments? Observations? Heckles?

Stuart Maxwell@stumax turninggrille.comExperience Architect at REI
