Rightmove Plus navigation

What is Rightmove Plus

Rightmove Plus is the online portal for Rightmove members to manage properties, enquiries, and reports. It's a tool for property professionals, including estate agents and auction houses. After years of fragmented development by multiple teams, the platform had become a labyrinth of features, buried under a navigation system that was overwhelming and inconsistent.

The trigger: A navigation system in chaos

It is a decade-old legacy platform developed by multiple product teams, each focusing on individual features. The lack of unified oversight of the platform's user experience led to a siloed approach to development. This fragmentation was particularly evident in the navigation system. Without a dedicated owner to manage it, product managers spent years adding pages to the navigation without a consistent structure or regulation. This resulted to a navigation that felt like a maze, with too many categories and unclear labels.

Previous design: Flat navigation with no consistent structure or regulation

Strategic Analysis

1. Uncovering the hidden gems (and the mess)

I’ve begun auditing the existing navigation structure to assess how features were organised. The navigation relied on a flat structure, meaning all items existed on a single level without any nested categorization. While this approach provided immediate visibility, it lacked scalability and risked overwhelming users with too many options at once.

My audit also revealed several redundancies, with certain products unnecessarily cluttering the navigation despite being better suited elsewhere in the app. For example Cookie settings and Privacy policy where misplaced within the main menu, as well as the My profile - a personal settings feature, that was more logically housed under the profile icon.

Rightmove Plus serves a diverse user base, including independent agents, large multi-office agencies, and franchises. Each group has unique needs and varying levels of access to features. To better understand these dynamics, I collaborated with my product manager to create a matrix that mapped out which features were accessible to each user type. The matrix clarified feature distribution but also exposed gaps in discoverability. For example, features available to specific company types were often hidden within a one-size-fits-all navigation structure. The matrix helped us design a navigation that was tailored to user-specific needs while maintaining a consistent experience across all company types.

To further understand the problem, I gathered additional data like through click tracking from the analytics team, and launched a Hotjar survey to understand how users feel about their navigational experience. Surprisingly, despite clear UX shortcomings, the navigation was objectively bad based on basic UX best practices, many users rated their experience a 5 out of 5, suggesting a disconnect between perceived satisfaction and actual usability.

Click tracking helped uncover why this disconnect existed. There was a significant imbalance in feature visibility. The top of the navigation was overcrowded, while valuable but less prominent features remained underused. Users primarily engaged with what was immediately accessible, reinforcing the perception that these were the only available tools. This explained the high satisfaction scores despite clear usability flaws. While this insight was revealing, I needed to validate my assumptions further. But more on that later.

2. Insights gathering through cross-team workshop

To ensure a comprehensive understanding of internal and external pain points, I conducted a workshop with all the teams working in Rightmove Plus. This workshop brought together representatives from product, design, support, sales, and customer success teams. Each team had its own priorities and perspectives, and aligning them around a shared vision required careful facilitation.

The workshop was structured to consolidate existing user research, identify recurring pain points, and prioritise features based on user needs and business goals. But it wasn’t just about gathering insights, it was about building consensus.

The workshop's outcomes directly shaped the redesign by helping me prioritise high-impact features and create a task-based navigation structure that aligned with both user needs and internal workflows.

Design principles

To distill key insights from the workshop, I led an affinity mapping exercise where participants grouped and voted on the most pressing pain points. The top themes became the foundation for my design principles, ensuring the new navigation addressed both user frustrations and business needs.

These principles served as a strategic north star throughout the redesign, keeping our focus on creating a navigation system that was both user-centric and future-proof.

Scalability

The navigation should be flexible and adaptable, supporting growth and evolving content without compromising performance or usability.

Usability

It should be intuitive, efficient, and accessible, ensuring users can easily interact with and understand the system.

Findability

Information should be logically structured and easy to locate, enabling users to quickly find what they need with minimal effort. Navigation should make it easy for users to discover and explore our offerings, ensuring content is well-structured and accessible with minimal effort.

Crafting the design approach

1. Vertical navigation

I opted for a vertical navigation, which unlike a horizontal, it is more scalable, and a better fit for growing Information Architectures, since it can accommodate as many top-tier categories as needed. To prevent overwhelming the users with a flat hierarchy, I introduced sub-levels to group related futures logically - this was the biggest departure from our previous navigation.

2. Sub-menus

To ensure the most effective navigation structure, I experimented with various design approaches, including secondary sidebars, flyout menus, accordions and overlays.

4. Switch branch

Around 73% of users work across multiple branches, requiring frequent switching throughout their workflow. Previously, this meant navigating through Office List > Select Branch > Dashboard > Returning to the tool, adding unnecessary friction. To streamline this, I introduced a header dropdown, allowing seamless branch switching from anywhere on the platform.

This change reduced the steps from 7 to just 2—a 66% improvement. In just one month post-launch, 19% of users had already adopted the feature, highlighting its immediate impact.

5. Gathering feedback

I ran the designs through the rest of the team and gathering feedback. The teams loved the added features, and we’ve decided to move forward with the sub-menus as secondary sidebars, which made switching between products seamless and improved discoverability.

From chaos to clarity

The redesigned navigation focused on clarity, efficiency, and scalability. The features were restructured around core workflows rather than product silos. I Introduced a clean, top-level menu with clear labels and secondary menus optimised for quick scanning.

How our customers shaped the navigation

To ensure the redesign hit the mark, I partnered with a UX researcher to conduct usability testing with 5 users. The results were promising.

We created a research plan to evaluate the navigation’s effectiveness through open-ended questions and task-based evaluations like locating Best Price Guide (which was now moved inside a category), to capture a mix of qualitative and quantitative insights.

Our users provided us actionable feedback for refinement, such as improving the labelling of some of the categories and restructuring the information architecture to better match user expectations. These insights fed directly into iterative adjustments, ensuring that the final navigation system delivered maximum value.

Key findings:

• Users were unaware of many of features and tools, confirming my initial assumptions.

• They completed key tasks, like updating their profile information, 40% faster than with the old navigation.

• They were able to locate their most-used features in a similar timeframe (±10s), giving us confidence that the new navigation wasn't as risky as we'd feared.

• 4 out of 5 users reported that the new look and feel was far superior to the previous version.

Overcoming challenges: Responsiveness and Resource constraints

Most features in Rightmove Plus are not responsive, which posed an issue with the secondary sidebar for smaller destkops and below. Initially, the plan was all the product teams would do some work and make them responsive prior to the new navigation release. Unfortunately, company priorities have shifted, and the product teams were unable to prioritise the work required. I had to find a different solution to display the sub menus.

I went back into the drawing board and came up with a different solution, which was a sequential menu. A sequential menu shows only the subcategories of the last selected category. While unconventional for desktop applications, it is still a simple, elegant workaround that users found intuitive.

Guiding our users through change

The new navigation was a significant shift, so I created a guided tour to ease the transition. With fewer than six steps (optimized for short-term memory), the tour highlighted key features and ensured users could quickly adapt. Even though the user testings gave us confident results, we wanted to reassure users their go-to tool was still easily accessible, so I made sure that it was highlighted in the tour.

From vision to reality

To ensure a seamless rollout, I worked closely with engineering, product, and support teams:

• Detailed Specs: Provided design specifications, including edge cases and interaction behaviors, to developers.

• Phased Rollout: Piloted the redesign with a subset of users, gathering feedback before full deployment.

• Support Enablement: Created training materials and demo videos to help agents adapt to the changes.

Metrics that matter

The redesigned navigation launched in December 2024, and the results spoke for themselves.

• 43% improvement in bounce rate

• 4.2 Customer satisfaction score with

• 82.5% of users saying the "liked" or "loved" the new design

• 21 minutes increase in session duration

What I took away

• Trade-offs are inevitable: Balancing simplicity with feature discoverability required tough decisions.

• Flexibility is key: When plans change, creativity and adaptability can save a day

• User feedback is gold: Testing and iteration are non-negotiable for delivering a great experience. However you must take user feedback with a pinch of salt, because users don't know what they want until you show it to them.

• Future Vision: Although I didn't point it out in the case study (in the spirit of being succinct), creating a future vision for the product allowed me to see the bigger picture, allow teams to see the product through my eyes, and set the stage for modular updates as Rightmove Plus evolves.