How efficient navigation solved our biggest reordering obstacle

Opening

On a B2B platform built for bar owners, restaurant managers, and shop owners placing recurring orders, every extra tap is friction. These are people ordering between shifts, often on mobile, with limited time and a clear goal: get in, reorder, get out. The faster they can move between the product catalogue, their order history, and their loyalty points, the better the experience. And for a long time, that journey was more cumbersome than it needed to be.

Spotting the problem

The signal came from the data, specifically from a Hotjar Watchparty session where the team was observing real user behaviour together. Heatmaps from Myanmar consistently showed the hamburger menu as one of the most interacted-with elements across the PLP, Club page, and Order confirmation page. Meanwhile, our Q3 UX insights report showed that Orders and Club were among the most visited pages, with Order History ranking particularly high in South Asia and Singapore.

The pattern was clear: users were repeatedly navigating back and forth between the product list and their order history to cross-reference previous orders while building a new one. The only route available was through the hamburger menu, every single time. For a reordering journey built on speed and familiarity, that was a meaningful obstacle.

The hypothesis

If key sections were made more visible and directly accessible in the mobile navigation, users would move between the platform's core areas more efficiently. We expected to see an increase in visits to Orders and Club, and a reduction in the friction caused by repeatedly opening and closing the hamburger menu.

What we designed and tested

I designed a bottom navigation bar for mobile, giving direct access to Products, Orders, eazleClub, Account, and Cart. To run a clean test, we also removed the Cart icon from the header bar and kept the hamburger menu visible, specifically to see whether users would gravitate toward the more obvious navigation option even when the familiar one was still there.

The A/B test ran for six weeks across all mobile sessions in Myanmar, with a 50/50 traffic split.

What the results told us

The primary goal was achieved. Visits to the Orders page increased by 27.9% and Club visits grew by 3.4%. The bottom bar was used in 64.3% of all sessions, and hamburger menu usage dropped by 22.1%, which told us users preferred the more accessible navigation when it was available.

But the test also introduced friction we hadn't fully anticipated. Users expected the Cart icon to stay in the header bar, where they'd always found it. Moving it to the bottom bar led to a spike in Account page visits driven largely by miss-clicks from users aiming for the Cart. The reduced viewport also made product browsing slightly harder. These friction points contributed to a 1.7% drop in conversion rate and a 3.8% decrease in average order value.

Iterating before shipping

The recommendation from the test was clear: don't implement as tested, iterate first. That's exactly what we did.

The core insight was that the bottom bar needed to be purely a navigation surface, not a home for transactional actions like the Cart. So in the iterated version, the Cart moved back to the header bar where users expected it, freeing up space in the bottom bar and reducing miss-clicks. The navigation bar was also set to disappear on scroll, giving users back the viewport space they needed while browsing the product list. The result was a cleaner separation between navigation and actions: top bar for session-critical tasks, bottom bar for moving between sections.

What I'm most proud of

We didn't just implement a popular UI pattern because it felt right. We traced a real user behaviour from behavioral data, turned it into a testable hypothesis, ran a proper experiment, read the results honestly including the parts that didn't go our way, and used that to shape a better solution. The navigation bar is now live because the data earned it, not because someone assumed it was a good idea.

What I learned

Familiar patterns carry learned expectations, and moving the Cart broke one users had built over time. That's not a reason to avoid change, but it is a reason to be precise about which conventions you're disrupting and why. Testing with the Cart in the bottom bar was actually a useful decision in hindsight, because it gave us certainty about where it needed to live in the final version. We didn't get it right on the first try, and that's exactly why the second version is better.