In the past year LivingSocial has changed the company dramatically, moving further away from the deal-a-day business model it was founded on and towards more of a marketplace strategy.

To help support that shift I have recently lead a redesign and rearchitecture of the LivingSocial consumer site. The first project that we needed to complete to support the shift was to redesign our header. Because the inventory on the site was growing dramatically we needed a much more browsable architecture. Instead of adding more top level navigation items we actually removed some and increased our secondary level categories.

With more inventory it also allowed us to promote search more prominently on the site and the need for faceting tools became much greater. For the first time in our existence we had enough inventory to support users with more specific goals and we created an intuitive architecture that allowed them to navigate those needs simply and easily.

Another benefit to added inventory was an opportunity to change our home page to better promote all the offers we had. This also meant we could merchandise our inventory better and provide even more personalized context to the shopping experience. The below wireframe displays some of the concepts that actually made it to production and includes some features that are either still in development or that didn't make it through the user testing.