ESPN.com launches new navigation and search features
ESPN recently launched a series of new features aimed at improving the navigation experience on the site. Some of the notable improvements include:
- Ability to customize the main navigation links. Don’t like NASCAR or Tennis? No problem. Take them out of the navigation bar and replace them with sports you care about, like college basketball or MMA.
- “Mega-dropdown” menus. When hovering over a sport, users now can navigate to popular pages within that section and also get key headlines without having to click through to the section. This is a huge improvement as it essentially allows users to get to any key page within ESPN from the page they’re currently looking at. No need to first visit a section index page (e.g. NBA) before clicking through to an interior page (e.g. NBA standings).
- Search. The ESPN search experience is completely redesigned. Users can now easily refine their search by content type or by date range, the 2 most asked for filtering options by ESPN users. Video and photo content can be consumed without leaving the page via an overlay experience, allowing users to view dynamic video playlists or photo galleries of content (like “LeBron James” for example). The relevancy of the results has been improved, and the search suggestion box now includes images for players, teams, and ESPN columnists.
Take a look at the new features and let us know what you think about the new navigation and the new ESPN Search features. We’ll be actively reviewing user feedback to make even more improvements.
New navigation (showing my own personalized nav bar and visual search suggestions):
New ESPN Search page:
Video overlay inside ESPN Search:
Also, check out a more detailed overview of the improvements to the site navigation.
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