CTV News - Web Navigation & Menu Structure

The Challenge
CTVNews.ca had more than 25 items in the “News” navigation with little hierarchy and inconsistent groupings between sections.
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Important categories like World, Canada, Local, and key topics were hard to scan, and some items appeared in places users didn’t expect.
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The goal was to simplify the structure so users could quickly find the news they care about without hunting through the header.
Starting Point & Alignment

Before any user testing, I met with product and editorial leads to review business priorities and how the existing navigation was performing. We walked through click data and heatmaps to see which sections users gravitated to, ignored, or struggled to reach.

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From there we aligned on success measures for the new navigation: cut the number of top-level items, create a clearer hierarchy between main sections and sub-sections, and make it easier for users to reach Canada, World, Local, and major coverage areas without scanning a 25-item header.

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I also synced with engineering and content operations to understand constraints of the new content management system: how many links the header could support, what type of dropdown behaviour was feasible, and how navigation changes would fit into existing templates and workflows.

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Research: Open & Closed Card Sorting

To understand how users naturally think about CTV News content, I ran open and closed card sorts with 15 regular readers. Each user sorted 22 topic cards (Canada, World, Politics, Business, Health, Weather, wars, Wildfires, etc.) into groups that made sense to them, then named those groups.

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Key Takeaways

  • Conflicts like War in Ukraine and Israel–Hamas War were usually under World or “Global conflicts”.
  • Users grouped topics by place, theme, and format.
  • Politics, Sci-Tech, and Autos kept landing in multiple groups, so they needed flexible placement and cross-links.
  • Climate & Environment and Wildfires almost always appeared together.
Applying the New Information Architecture

Using the card-sorting insights and CMS constraints, I drafted a simplified navigation model that reduced noise at the top while keeping depth where it mattered.

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Key Interaction Improvements:
  • Reduced the number of L1 items so the header focuses on the core ways users enter the site (for example: Local, Watch, Live).
  • Reflected how users actually group topics, instead of mirroring internal org structures.
  • Allowing users to favourite and reorder locations for a more personalized experience
Reflections

The project showed that small structural decisions add up quickly. Once we aligned on fewer, clearer categories grounded in user research, everything else like click paths, content ownership, and future changes became easier.