As the product and data teams began developing a new book scoring algorithm, I conducted qualitative research to investigate the challenges users encounter with the current topic pages. I also sought to understand how users browse for topics, what information they look for when evaluating content for relevance, and how they engage with recommended content. In addition, I conducted competitor research to identify browsing patterns in large content libraries and examine how algorithmic and editorial content can be combined to display the most relevant titles for users' topics of interest.

I found that early-career scholars require guidance on relevant content and prefer a general overview of the topic. On the other hand, post-grad students and researchers seek detailed information and tend to explore new content only after exhausting their existing materials. Additionally, I discovered that the current topic page header navigation was not user-friendly, leading users to not explore content beyond the front page.
I summarised my findings in a research deck and presented them to the team to agree on a way forward.

I began ideating on different information architectures and layout solutions to meet the different needs of Perlego's user groups. Starting with initial sketches, I focused on breaking down topics into different sections to provide users with quick access to newly released, recently added content, and expert curation. One of my main focuses was to make it easy to zoom in and out of subtopics to find detailed information when necessary.

I regularly presented and discussed different layout options and user testing results with stakeholders from the product, data, and design teams and collaborated closely with the systems design lead to redesign the tab navigation component, with the goal of improving user navigation across different pages.

After creating several potential layouts, I shared the designs internally and contacted users I had previously interviewed for this project to gather their feedback on the new layout options.

While the project stakeholders preferred a multi-column layout with a sidebar, I discovered that participants actually favored a vertical stack of content and subtopic carousels as they found it easier to explore niche topics.

After gathering the final insights, I started putting together the handoff files for the engineering team. We agreed to implement a phased rollout plan for the updates to the topics page, aiming to ship updates on a weekly basis and test our assumptions directly with the audience.

The updated layout not only provides users with a more efficient and organised way to browse the extensive content catalogue but also enhances the way content is ranked and presented to users. The new topic pages are designed to be modular, making it easy for Perlego to rearrange sections to better suit specific topics and markets, or spotlight different authors and publishers in the future. We also immediately noticed improved SEO performance as the number of books indexed by search engines grew significantly.