Cutting a 7-Level Menu Down to 3

GetGo's mobile app required up to 7 taps to reach the "Add to Order" button. The menu had 419 line items with inconsistent naming, no clear hierarchy, and categories that didn't match how users thought about food.

Busy professionals, students, and retirees all described the same frustration: it was faster to go in person than to order on the app.

As the sole UX designer and researcher on this project, I owned every phase — from initial discovery through final prototype. I started with in-depth user interviews and surveys across three distinct user segments: busy professionals, tech-savvy students, and detail-oriented retirees.

I audited every item in the existing menu, identified redundancies, and restructured the taxonomy from scratch. Items were consolidated from 419 to 205 — more than half — without removing a single product from the offering.

I designed and ran A/B testing comparing the original menu against my proposed taxonomy. Results were clear across both speed and accuracy metrics.

Nearly every individual item showed improvement in the test menu. The most dramatic gains came from items that had been buried under ambiguous parent categories in the original structure.

The redesigned taxonomy was presented to GetGo stakeholders with full documentation of the research methodology, A/B test results, and design rationale. The project demonstrated measurable impact from IA decisions alone — before a single visual design change was made.

This project proved that information architecture is often the highest-leverage UX work — invisible when done right, painful when done wrong.

The visual design of the app hadn't changed. The content hadn't changed. Only the structure changed. And that alone cut friction by 43%.