Home page and top navigation
As you can see from this screenshot, circa 2014, the MyFonts home page was overdue for an update. The last time it had been touched was 2008.
The goals for the redesign were:
• Simplify the navigation to funnel users to our most popular pages
• Display our best fonts in a new, compelling way
• Feature popular type designers
Based on these needs, I came up with a new concept: turn the home page into a feed that surfaces our new and best content and provides the user with a compelling route into discovering MyFonts.
The new home page is a mix of curated and automatically generated content based on popularity and revenue. In the main column, we feature staff picks as well as new fonts, and fonts that are on sale. This ensures that we keep the home page quality high and always have beautiful font imagery there.
For the top navigation, I first looked at the data to discover our top performing pages. Based on this, I simplified the information architecture. I removed the dropdowns to expose our most valuable pages such as Hot New Fonts. I went through all the dropdown items and removed links to pages that were less useful. The result was a simple top navigation that funneled users directly to the pages that they were most interested in. We saw a revenue increase after this change. Moral of the story: don't hide your best pages!
On the new home page, there are additional ways to explore the MyFonts: the live purchase maps which show what fonts are being purchased right now in different parts of the world, and the portraits of the font designers who sell on our site. The portrait illustrations are by Bea Davies. You can see her project on Behance here.
Additional thoughts: this home page represents a first iteration of the concept, and gives us a framework to add new content in the future that's relevant to our users. For example, we've already added a categories section based on user feedback. We have lots of other ideas planned!
