Content Navigation Redesign
att.net was AT&T's web portal: 45 million+ email users, most of them over 50, and $41M+ a year in ad revenue, with content syndicated from partners like CNN, USA Today, TIME, and Sports Illustrated. As Lead UX Designer I owned the desktop navigation redesign, working to get more people past their inbox and into the content verticals that paid the bills.
Most users checked email, skimmed a few homepage stories, and left. The content verticals that carried the ad revenue were effectively hidden: subcategories only appeared after a user clicked into a vertical and waited for a full page reload. Someone had to click "Sports" and reload before they ever saw NFL or NBA.
This wasn't the only AT&T surface on my plate. I ran the portal navigation redesign at the same time as AT&T Live, a native Android app combining att.net email with news and video. Two products, two codebases, overlapping stakeholders, concurrent timelines. Holding both meant keeping patterns consistent where it helped users and deliberately diverging where the platforms demanded it, while staying legible to two engineering teams at once.
Performance metrics, stakeholder interviews, AT&T user surveys, and competitive analysis all pointed the same direction: nearly every major news site used horizontal navigation. The pattern had also already proven itself inside AT&T's own ecosystem. On mobile, a horizontal nav had lifted vertical page views 41% and article page views 13%, and that precedent built the business case for bringing it to desktop.
I researched navigation best practices (7–9 top-level items is the comfortable ceiling) and worked with AT&T to consolidate a sprawl of links into a dropdown, keeping the focus on the core content verticals.
Rather than plain subcategory lists, I explored editor-curated content cards inside each dropdown, so hovering a category previewed the vertical's actual stories instead of just naming them. The bet was that showing the content, not just labeling it, would pull more users in.
We ran the redesign as live experiments through Adobe Test & Target against 10% of users, and the first round taught us something uncomfortable: people weren't hovering enough to ever discover the content cards.
Round two tested the affordances directly: tab-like nav items, uppercase versus title case, and added directional arrows to signal the dropdowns existed. The arrows and uppercase treatment increased clicks into the dropdown by 25%.
I also validated the direction with the actual audience, testing with the 50+ demographic through UserTesting. They overwhelmingly preferred the horizontal nav and singled out the content cards as a helpful way to find related stories.
The data didn't just pick a layout. It kept picking apart my assumptions until the design earned its lift.
The shipped design separated content navigation from the AT&T-properties area, a split users found much clearer and one that finally resolved the too-many-items problem the org had struggled to prioritize down on its own. The horizontal content nav made the revenue-driving verticals visible without a reload, and the A/B-validated affordances drove the 25% lift in dropdown engagement.