When product growth puts navigation under pressure
Restoring hierarchy, orientation, and progressive disclosure in a rapidly evolving system.
Summary:
Results:
- Clearer and more consistent navigation paths across the different product views.
- Improved user orientation during access, exploration, and project work phases.
- Reduced uncertainty related to the position and role of available views.
- A progressive disclosure of functionality based on user context and workflow.
Type of work:
Navigation audit of the existing interface, UX analysis based on observational analysis of real usage patterns, redesign of the view architecture, and iterative prototyping of contextual navigation solutions.
Delivery:
- Reorganization proposal for the global header and main views.
- A progressive navigation model applied to Collection and Project views.
- Functional prototypes to validate new access and orientation logics.
Team:
Giacomo Dalia, confronto continuo con stakeholder interni e team di sviluppo di Segno.
My role:
Product Designer Consultant — analisi dei pain point legati alla navigazione, ridefinizione della gerarchia delle viste, progettazione dei flussi di accesso e orientamento, con particolare attenzione alla coerenza tra contesto, azioni disponibili e aspettative dell’utente.
Note
What started as a targeted navigation redesign quickly highlighted the need to rethink operational actions within the grid as well, which eventually led to the second case study: “Simplifying the Most Frequent Action”.
Introduction
As anticipated in the project overview, Segno is a product in constant evolution. It grows rapidly, layering features and usage patterns over time. While this growth is natural in an exploratory and experimental phase, it eventually required a moment of consolidation and reflection on the overall interface structure.
When I began working on Segno as a Product Designer Consultant, the first and most evident pain point emerging from daily use of the platform was navigation. The system was rich in functionality, but the flow was not immediately legible, and the commands governing it often appeared misaligned with the expectations of users involved in beta testing.
Context and Problem
Segno’s navigation had evolved incrementally, following feature growth rather than a cohesive navigation strategy. This led to:
- Implicit or unclear paths between different product sections.
- Available actions that were difficult to discover.
- A distribution of commands not always aligned with standard usability principles.
A representative example was the platform header. In conventional layouts, the logo in the top‑left corner acts as an anchor to return to the home view. In Segno, that space was instead occupied by user settings, alongside search and contextual help.
Returning to the home view relied on a path visible only after entering a project and positioned at the center of the header—an unexpected placement that risked making users feel “trapped” inside a project. This effect was amplified by the browser’s back button, which returned users to the browser's search results page rather than preserving task continuity.
First Intervention — header reorganization
The initial intervention focused on normalizing the header, aligning it with more familiar and predictable interaction patterns:
- Reintroducing the Home action via the product logo in the top‑left corner.
- Moving secondary commands (settings, search, help) to the right side.
- Temporarily preserving the existing behavior of search and help, postponing their optimization to later iterations.
The path previously placed in the header was removed and rethought as a subordinate element, reducing cognitive ambiguity and freeing visual space.
A View System grown without a clear hierarchy
The most critical issues emerged in cross-view navigation between the product’s different views. Users interacted with a tab‑based structure composed of:
- Collection — the main view listing projects.
- Project — the single‑project view (disabled until a project is accessed).
- Presentation — a high‑value feature, also disabled until entering a project.
- Community — always active, independent of context, collecting editorial project templates and user‑shared contributions as inspiration and reuse material.
Additionally, a list view of concepts—semantically related to the others—was placed within settings. The result was a fragmented view system, shaped by rapid growth that left structural decisions partially unresolved.
The Redesign — Contextual and progressive navigation
The redesign introduced a fundamental shift: moving away from static tabs in favor of contextual navigation that adapts to the user’s current state.
In the Collection view:
- The area previously occupied by tabs was transformed into a Community template carousel, giving it greater prominence.
- Access to full templates became a clear, dedicated action.
- Project‑specific views are hidden until a project is accessed—when they become relevant.
Inside a project:
- The same space now hosts contextual information: project name, save status, export and sharing actions.
- Project views are grouped into minimal icon‑based tabs positioned on the right.
- Two additional views were introduced:
- A document view, where AI organizes concepts into a narrative form.
- A tree view, familiar to users accustomed to traditional concept maps.
This approach made navigation progressive, exposing functionality only when it is useful.
Validation and early feedback
Navigation changes were iterated and evaluated primarily through direct observation of platform usage and qualitative feedback from beta testers.
At this stage, the goal was not formal quantitative measurement, but verification of:
- Improved clarity of main navigation paths.
- Reduced uncertainty during interface exploration.
- Perceived coherence between context, available commands, and expected actions.
Feedback indicated better understanding of navigation flow and reduced friction during early usage. The redesign was therefore considered sufficiently solid to continue development.
In later phases, the system can support more structured validation activities—such as standardized usability scales or comparative testing—once the core feature set is stabilized.
From navigation to actions
Once global navigation was consolidated, attention shifted to actions within the grid—the operational space where concepts are created, modified, and related.
Early versions of Segno relied heavily on right‑click contextual menus. Core actions such as creating a new clip, adding milestones, or managing relationships required prior knowledge of specific gestures and insertion points. While efficient for expert users, this approach was difficult to read for first‑time users.
As the product evolved, interaction models expanded. Explicit element selection was introduced, along with an action bar that appears when one or more clips are selected. New features followed, including Insert in Flow, allowing users to insert a clip within an existing relationship.
While addressing real needs, this growth created interaction inconsistencies: some actions were row‑based, others selection‑based, and others exclusive to the action bar. Clarifying how users interact with their projects became essential.
From this analysis,o interaction categories emerged:
- Immediate, frequent actions, tied to the rhythm of grid work and optimized for speed.
- Structural actions, affecting an element’s nature and requiring dedicated attention.
The intervention focused on immediate actions. The contextual menu remains available but is no longer the primary interaction channel. Most actions now flow through a context‑aware action bar that adapts based on what is selected—or provides default actions when nothing is selected.
In this framework:
- Double‑clicking the grid was assigned to fast clip creation.
- Milestone creation was removed from this gesture and made available via the action bar or contextual menu.
- Insert in Flow was redesigned to occur directly on the connection between clips, making both gesture and placement explicit.
These changes realigned interactions with the grid’s visual and spatial context, reducing ambiguity and cognitive load.
Repeated feedback during testing highlighted one remaining issue: while basic actions became clearer, creating a complete clip rstill felt heavy The modal contained many options, required multiple clicks, and poorly communicated the final outcome.
This revealed the next design need: improving the creation and configuration experience for different clip types (gateways, events, objects). This insight directly led to the second case study, focused on simplifying and clarifying Segno’s most frequent action—clip creation.
When product growth puts navigation under pressure
Restoring hierarchy, orientation, and progressive disclosure in a rapidly evolving system.
Summary:
Results:
- Clearer and more consistent navigation paths across the different product views.
- Improved user orientation during access, exploration, and project work phases.
- Reduced uncertainty related to the position and role of available views.
- A progressive disclosure of functionality based on user context and workflow.
Type of work:
Navigation audit of the existing interface, UX analysis based on observational analysis of real usage patterns, redesign of the view architecture, and iterative prototyping of contextual navigation solutions.
Delivery:
- Reorganization proposal for the global header and main views.
- A progressive navigation model applied to Collection and Project views.
- Functional prototypes to validate new access and orientation logics.
Team:
Giacomo Dalia, confronto continuo con stakeholder interni e team di sviluppo di Segno.
My role:
Product Designer Consultant — analisi dei pain point legati alla navigazione, ridefinizione della gerarchia delle viste, progettazione dei flussi di accesso e orientamento, con particolare attenzione alla coerenza tra contesto, azioni disponibili e aspettative dell’utente.
Note
What started as a targeted navigation redesign quickly highlighted the need to rethink operational actions within the grid as well, which eventually led to the second case study: “Simplifying the Most Frequent Action”.
Introduction
As anticipated in the project overview, Segno is a product in constant evolution. It grows rapidly, layering features and usage patterns over time. While this growth is natural in an exploratory and experimental phase, it eventually required a moment of consolidation and reflection on the overall interface structure.
When I began working on Segno as a Product Designer Consultant, the first and most evident pain point emerging from daily use of the platform was navigation. The system was rich in functionality, but the flow was not immediately legible, and the commands governing it often appeared misaligned with the expectations of users involved in beta testing.
Context and Problem
Segno’s navigation had evolved incrementally, following feature growth rather than a cohesive navigation strategy. This led to:
- Implicit or unclear paths between different product sections.
- Available actions that were difficult to discover.
- A distribution of commands not always aligned with standard usability principles.
A representative example was the platform header. In conventional layouts, the logo in the top‑left corner acts as an anchor to return to the home view. In Segno, that space was instead occupied by user settings, alongside search and contextual help.
Returning to the home view relied on a path visible only after entering a project and positioned at the center of the header—an unexpected placement that risked making users feel “trapped” inside a project. This effect was amplified by the browser’s back button, which returned users to the browser's search results page rather than preserving task continuity.
First Intervention — header reorganization
The initial intervention focused on normalizing the header, aligning it with more familiar and predictable interaction patterns:
- Reintroducing the Home action via the product logo in the top‑left corner.
- Moving secondary commands (settings, search, help) to the right side.
- Temporarily preserving the existing behavior of search and help, postponing their optimization to later iterations.
The path previously placed in the header was removed and rethought as a subordinate element, reducing cognitive ambiguity and freeing visual space.
A View System grown without a clear hierarchy
The most critical issues emerged in cross-view navigation between the product’s different views. Users interacted with a tab‑based structure composed of:
- Collection — the main view listing projects.
- Project — the single‑project view (disabled until a project is accessed).
- Presentation — a high‑value feature, also disabled until entering a project.
- Community — always active, independent of context, collecting editorial project templates and user‑shared contributions as inspiration and reuse material.
Additionally, a list view of concepts—semantically related to the others—was placed within settings. The result was a fragmented view system, shaped by rapid growth that left structural decisions partially unresolved.
The Redesign — Contextual and progressive navigation
The redesign introduced a fundamental shift: moving away from static tabs in favor of contextual navigation that adapts to the user’s current state.
In the Collection view:
- The area previously occupied by tabs was transformed into a Community template carousel, giving it greater prominence.
- Access to full templates became a clear, dedicated action.
- Project‑specific views are hidden until a project is accessed—when they become relevant.
Inside a project:
- The same space now hosts contextual information: project name, save status, export and sharing actions.
- Project views are grouped into minimal icon‑based tabs positioned on the right.
- Two additional views were introduced:
- A document view, where AI organizes concepts into a narrative form.
- A tree view, familiar to users accustomed to traditional concept maps.
This approach made navigation progressive, exposing functionality only when it is useful.
Validation and early feedback
Navigation changes were iterated and evaluated primarily through direct observation of platform usage and qualitative feedback from beta testers.
At this stage, the goal was not formal quantitative measurement, but verification of:
- Improved clarity of main navigation paths.
- Reduced uncertainty during interface exploration.
- Perceived coherence between context, available commands, and expected actions.
Feedback indicated better understanding of navigation flow and reduced friction during early usage. The redesign was therefore considered sufficiently solid to continue development.
In later phases, the system can support more structured validation activities—such as standardized usability scales or comparative testing—once the core feature set is stabilized.
From navigation to actions
Once global navigation was consolidated, attention shifted to actions within the grid—the operational space where concepts are created, modified, and related.
Early versions of Segno relied heavily on right‑click contextual menus. Core actions such as creating a new clip, adding milestones, or managing relationships required prior knowledge of specific gestures and insertion points. While efficient for expert users, this approach was difficult to read for first‑time users.
As the product evolved, interaction models expanded. Explicit element selection was introduced, along with an action bar that appears when one or more clips are selected. New features followed, including Insert in Flow, allowing users to insert a clip within an existing relationship.
While addressing real needs, this growth created interaction inconsistencies: some actions were row‑based, others selection‑based, and others exclusive to the action bar. Clarifying how users interact with their projects became essential.
From this analysis,o interaction categories emerged:
- Immediate, frequent actions, tied to the rhythm of grid work and optimized for speed.
- Structural actions, affecting an element’s nature and requiring dedicated attention.
The intervention focused on immediate actions. The contextual menu remains available but is no longer the primary interaction channel. Most actions now flow through a context‑aware action bar that adapts based on what is selected—or provides default actions when nothing is selected.
In this framework:
- Double‑clicking the grid was assigned to fast clip creation.
- Milestone creation was removed from this gesture and made available via the action bar or contextual menu.
- Insert in Flow was redesigned to occur directly on the connection between clips, making both gesture and placement explicit.
These changes realigned interactions with the grid’s visual and spatial context, reducing ambiguity and cognitive load.
Repeated feedback during testing highlighted one remaining issue: while basic actions became clearer, creating a complete clip rstill felt heavy The modal contained many options, required multiple clicks, and poorly communicated the final outcome.
This revealed the next design need: improving the creation and configuration experience for different clip types (gateways, events, objects). This insight directly led to the second case study, focused on simplifying and clarifying Segno’s most frequent action—clip creation.
When product growth puts navigation under pressure
Restoring hierarchy, orientation, and progressive disclosure in a rapidly evolving system.
Summary:
Results:
- Clearer and more consistent navigation paths across the different product views.
- Improved user orientation during access, exploration, and project work phases.
- Reduced uncertainty related to the position and role of available views.
- A progressive disclosure of functionality based on user context and workflow.
Type of work:
Navigation audit of the existing interface, UX analysis based on observational analysis of real usage patterns, redesign of the view architecture, and iterative prototyping of contextual navigation solutions.
Delivery:
- Reorganization proposal for the global header and main views.
- A progressive navigation model applied to Collection and Project views.
- Functional prototypes to validate new access and orientation logics.
Team:
Giacomo Dalia, confronto continuo con stakeholder interni e team di sviluppo di Segno.
My role:
Product Designer Consultant — analisi dei pain point legati alla navigazione, ridefinizione della gerarchia delle viste, progettazione dei flussi di accesso e orientamento, con particolare attenzione alla coerenza tra contesto, azioni disponibili e aspettative dell’utente.
Note
What started as a targeted navigation redesign quickly highlighted the need to rethink operational actions within the grid as well, which eventually led to the second case study: “Simplifying the Most Frequent Action”.
Introduction
As anticipated in the project overview, Segno is a product in constant evolution. It grows rapidly, layering features and usage patterns over time. While this growth is natural in an exploratory and experimental phase, it eventually required a moment of consolidation and reflection on the overall interface structure.
When I began working on Segno as a Product Designer Consultant, the first and most evident pain point emerging from daily use of the platform was navigation. The system was rich in functionality, but the flow was not immediately legible, and the commands governing it often appeared misaligned with the expectations of users involved in beta testing.
Context and Problem
Segno’s navigation had evolved incrementally, following feature growth rather than a cohesive navigation strategy. This led to:
- Implicit or unclear paths between different product sections.
- Available actions that were difficult to discover.
- A distribution of commands not always aligned with standard usability principles.
A representative example was the platform header. In conventional layouts, the logo in the top‑left corner acts as an anchor to return to the home view. In Segno, that space was instead occupied by user settings, alongside search and contextual help.
Returning to the home view relied on a path visible only after entering a project and positioned at the center of the header—an unexpected placement that risked making users feel “trapped” inside a project. This effect was amplified by the browser’s back button, which returned users to the browser's search results page rather than preserving task continuity.
First Intervention — header reorganization
The initial intervention focused on normalizing the header, aligning it with more familiar and predictable interaction patterns:
- Reintroducing the Home action via the product logo in the top‑left corner.
- Moving secondary commands (settings, search, help) to the right side.
- Temporarily preserving the existing behavior of search and help, postponing their optimization to later iterations.
The path previously placed in the header was removed and rethought as a subordinate element, reducing cognitive ambiguity and freeing visual space.
A View System grown without a clear hierarchy
The most critical issues emerged in cross-view navigation between the product’s different views. Users interacted with a tab‑based structure composed of:
- Collection — the main view listing projects.
- Project — the single‑project view (disabled until a project is accessed).
- Presentation — a high‑value feature, also disabled until entering a project.
- Community — always active, independent of context, collecting editorial project templates and user‑shared contributions as inspiration and reuse material.
Additionally, a list view of concepts—semantically related to the others—was placed within settings. The result was a fragmented view system, shaped by rapid growth that left structural decisions partially unresolved.
The Redesign — Contextual and progressive navigation
The redesign introduced a fundamental shift: moving away from static tabs in favor of contextual navigation that adapts to the user’s current state.
In the Collection view:
- The area previously occupied by tabs was transformed into a Community template carousel, giving it greater prominence.
- Access to full templates became a clear, dedicated action.
- Project‑specific views are hidden until a project is accessed—when they become relevant.
Inside a project:
- The same space now hosts contextual information: project name, save status, export and sharing actions.
- Project views are grouped into minimal icon‑based tabs positioned on the right.
- Two additional views were introduced:
- A document view, where AI organizes concepts into a narrative form.
- A tree view, familiar to users accustomed to traditional concept maps.
This approach made navigation progressive, exposing functionality only when it is useful.
Validation and early feedback
Navigation changes were iterated and evaluated primarily through direct observation of platform usage and qualitative feedback from beta testers.
At this stage, the goal was not formal quantitative measurement, but verification of:
- Improved clarity of main navigation paths.
- Reduced uncertainty during interface exploration.
- Perceived coherence between context, available commands, and expected actions.
Feedback indicated better understanding of navigation flow and reduced friction during early usage. The redesign was therefore considered sufficiently solid to continue development.
In later phases, the system can support more structured validation activities—such as standardized usability scales or comparative testing—once the core feature set is stabilized.
From navigation to actions
Once global navigation was consolidated, attention shifted to actions within the grid—the operational space where concepts are created, modified, and related.
Early versions of Segno relied heavily on right‑click contextual menus. Core actions such as creating a new clip, adding milestones, or managing relationships required prior knowledge of specific gestures and insertion points. While efficient for expert users, this approach was difficult to read for first‑time users.
As the product evolved, interaction models expanded. Explicit element selection was introduced, along with an action bar that appears when one or more clips are selected. New features followed, including Insert in Flow, allowing users to insert a clip within an existing relationship.
While addressing real needs, this growth created interaction inconsistencies: some actions were row‑based, others selection‑based, and others exclusive to the action bar. Clarifying how users interact with their projects became essential.
From this analysis,o interaction categories emerged:
- Immediate, frequent actions, tied to the rhythm of grid work and optimized for speed.
- Structural actions, affecting an element’s nature and requiring dedicated attention.
The intervention focused on immediate actions. The contextual menu remains available but is no longer the primary interaction channel. Most actions now flow through a context‑aware action bar that adapts based on what is selected—or provides default actions when nothing is selected.
In this framework:
- Double‑clicking the grid was assigned to fast clip creation.
- Milestone creation was removed from this gesture and made available via the action bar or contextual menu.
- Insert in Flow was redesigned to occur directly on the connection between clips, making both gesture and placement explicit.
These changes realigned interactions with the grid’s visual and spatial context, reducing ambiguity and cognitive load.
Repeated feedback during testing highlighted one remaining issue: while basic actions became clearer, creating a complete clip rstill felt heavy The modal contained many options, required multiple clicks, and poorly communicated the final outcome.
This revealed the next design need: improving the creation and configuration experience for different clip types (gateways, events, objects). This insight directly led to the second case study, focused on simplifying and clarifying Segno’s most frequent action—clip creation.