As part of Kit’s mission to work in public, we wanted to share our research and strategy behind redesigning the navigation. The following post comes directly from Alf Salib, the Product Designer at Kit who led our navigation redesign.

As of today, the vertical navigation is the only navigation in Kit, so this feels like a good moment to share a bit of an inside look into what went on behind the scenes.

Changing the navigation of a tool that people use every single day is one of the more disruptive things you can do as a product designer. That was something we knew going in, and it is why we made it a point to only make a decision if we were confident about it, and if it was backed by research done with real Kit creators.

What normally happens with a change like this is a changelog entry, a help doc, and a short note saying navigation has been improved, while all of the actual reasoning stays inside the company. That has always felt like a bit of a shame to me, because the reasoning is the interesting part! It’s also the part that answers the question most people have, which is simply “why?”.

So I wanted to share the whole process that went into this update. What we were trying to fix, the research that shaped the design, how the rollout actually went and what we changed because of your feedback, and where the nav goes from here.

Why Kit’s old navigation held creators back

The old navigation was a horizontal bar where every menu item lived inside a dropdown menu. It got the job done, and plenty of people knew it well, but it had a few problems that got harder to ignore as Kit grew.

• Features were buried. If a feature lived in a menu you never opened, you might not know it existed at all. We consistently heard feedback from users asking us to release features we already had, simply because they never opened the menu it lived in.
• Common pages were treated the same as rarely visited ones. Dashboard, Broadcasts and Subscribers—pages most people visit daily—sat in menus alongside pages you might visit once a quarter, if at all.
• There was no sense of place. Because every feature lived inside a menu, there was no active state showing your current page. The old nav looked identical no matter which page you were on. Navigating is much easier when you can use your current position as a reference point. Imagine using Google Maps without the blue dot showing your current location.
• There was nothing you could adjust. One rigid layout for everyone, whether it matched how you work or not.

Taking a look at these core problems, we started with a set of goals we wanted the new nav to achieve:

1. Better discoverability. Features shouldn’t be hidden behind a menu you have to think to open.
2. Make common pages prominent. Not being forced to group everything meant we could pull Dashboard, Broadcasts and Subscribers out of groups entirely, so they are always one click away.
3. A clear sense of where you are. Your current page should be visible at a glance.
4. Customizability. Expand the groups that matter to you, collapse the ones that don’t, and Kit remembers how you left it. When you want to focus, you can collapse the nav entirely to get it out of your way.

I do want to be upfront about something: there is no one-size-fits-all answer here. What feels obvious to one person can feel completely unintuitive to another, because everyone uses Kit in their own way. What we aimed for was the balance that works for the widest range of creators, not a layout that maps perfectly onto every single workflow.

The research behind Kit’s new navigation

By far the biggest thing that informed the design was testing it with creators. Rather than discussing and debating things internally, we let creators make the decision for us.

One deliberate choice that ran through all of them was recruiting a mix of existing Kit creators and people who had never used Kit before. There were two reasons for that:

• Existing creators carry a familiarity bias. If we only tested with them, we would largely be measuring how closely the new nav resembled the old one, which is not the same thing as measuring whether it is any good.
• We wanted to minimize the learning curve for new Kit users. The navigation should be intuitive and easy to pick up for someone opening Kit for the first time.

Three studies had a significant impact on the direction:

1. Page views and journey mapping

We looked at how many times each page in Kit was viewed, then mapped the most common paths creators took through the app. For a given page, we’d look at which page they were most likely to arrive from, and which page they were most likely to go to next. Doing this across the whole app let us make reasonable predictions about where someone would want to go from any given page, and it gave us a sense of which features are closely linked with one another, because they tend to be part of the same working session.

2. Card sorting

We ran a study asking participants to sort every Kit feature into groups that made sense to them. That told us how features should be grouped based on how creators think about them, rather than how we happen to think about them internally. The results came out fairly close to our existing grouping, which was reassuring, so the groups themselves didn’t change dramatically.

The most significant regrouping was probably Sequences. We originally had them grouped with Broadcasts, based on the fact that they were both emails, but participants consistently grouped them with automations instead, which makes sense when you consider that Sequences are most often used within a visual automation. Since they no longer sit alongside other email features, we decided to rename them from Sequences to Email Sequences to improve clarity.

3. A head-to-head prototype test

Once we had a layout we believed in, we pitted the old and new nav against each other to see which performed better. Creators were split into two groups, again a mix of existing Kit users and people who had never used it. One group got the old nav, the other got the new one, and everyone was given the same common tasks: send a broadcast, check the status of an automation, and so on.

People completed those tasks around 40% faster on the new nav, with fewer wrong clicks and fewer moments of being lost. The gap was biggest for people new to Kit, which we expected. What surprised us was that existing Kit creators who already knew the old nav well were also faster and more accurate on the new one. That’s really what assured us that we were on to something. The improvement over the old nav was real and measurable.

How we rolled out the new navigation

We knew that no matter how well it tested, the new nav would take some time to get used to, and we didn’t want to disrupt everyone’s workflows overnight. So we rolled it out over about two months.

• Late June, opt-in. Every creator got a prompt on login with two options, try the new navigation or stay on the old one, plus a way to switch between the two at any time from the account menu.
• Late July, opt-out. The new nav became the default, with opting out still available through the account menu.
• Late August, full rollout. The vertical nav became the only navigation.

We watched closely what creators chose to do. Roughly 70% of the creators who made a choice picked the new nav during the opt-in window, and around 92% of them stayed on it.

When someone did switch back, we prompted them with a quick survey asking why. That gave us a way to find the problems the new nav had introduced, and to fix them while creators still had the old nav as a safety net.

Some of the changes we shipped based on feedback:

1. A proper search and command palette. Hit Cmd/Ctrl + K, or the Search Kit button at the top of the nav, and you can jump straight to a page, a broadcast, a sequence or a subscriber without touching the nav at all. It also has shortcuts, so g s goes to subscribers and n b starts a new broadcast.
2. A keyboard shortcut for collapsing the nav. Cmd/Ctrl + \, matching the convention in a few other tools people use alongside Kit.
3. Auto-collapse in editors. Open a broadcast, landing page or automation and the nav collapses on its own, then restores your previous state when you leave.
4. Responsiveness fixes. A vertical nav takes up horizontal space that a horizontal nav doesn’t, which made some existing weaknesses on pages like Subscribers and Broadcasts much more obvious. We could have papered over that by collapsing the nav everywhere, but that felt like treating the symptom, so we went and fixed the pages instead. That work is still going.
5. A simpler mobile nav, which is now a single button in a floating panel at the bottom of the screen.
6. Rewritten help documentation and a walkthrough video, because a fair number of people quite reasonably went looking for help and found screenshots of a nav that no longer existed.

None of that makes the transition painless. When you’ve built up muscle memory over several years, a new layout can genuinely feel slower, even when the data says otherwise, because your hands keep instinctively reaching for the old spots. That’s a real concern, and I don’t want to dismiss it.

What I can say is that this was a considered change. It happened over several months, with hundreds of scrapped explorations and input from many Kit team members, and it was shaped by several rounds of research, surveys, and interviews to understand how creators actually use Kit day to day.

What happens next

The navigation design is by no means “done”, and I hope it never quite is. What I do think we are done with is redesigning it from the ground up.

Kit, like all technology, will keep growing and evolving over time, and every new feature we build has to find a home in the nav. Our goal is that the nav will continue to evolve as the product does over time. The structure we’ve set in place is something we can add to, rather than tear down and start from scratch again in a few years.

Thank you so much to everyone who tried the new nav early, told us what was broken, and put up with us fixing it in public. And thanks to our engineers, product marketing, and lifecycle teams, who did the much harder job of getting a change like this into the hands of creators.

Explore the redesigned navigation

If you want the full tour of what moved where, our help article on the new navigation covers everything you need to know, with a full walkthrough video.

And if there is anything you’re having trouble with, please let us know through our feedback forms or by contacting us at help@kit.com. If you would rather talk it through than type it out, you can reach out to me directly at alf@kit.com. I am always happy to jump on a call!

FAQ

Why did Kit change its navigation?

The old horizontal nav buried features in menus and gave no sense of where you were in the app. In testing, creators completed common tasks around 40% faster on the new vertical nav, with fewer wrong clicks — including creators who already knew the old nav well.

Can I switch back to Kit’s old navigation?

No. As of the full rollout, the vertical nav is the only navigation in Kit. If something about it isn’t working for you, reach out through Kit’s feedback form or at help@kit.com.

What happened to Sequences in Kit?

They’re now called Email Sequences and live under Automations instead of Broadcasts. Creator testing showed people think of sequences as part of an automation, not as a type of email, so the grouping moved to match.

What is Kit’s command palette and how do I use it?

Hit Cmd/Ctrl + K (or the Search Kit button) to jump straight to a page, broadcast, sequence, or subscriber without touching the nav. It also takes shortcuts — g s for subscribers, n b for a new broadcast.