When Nobody Uses the Website Anymore
Client: Kongsberg Maritime
The challenge
Kongsberg Maritime's website had become difficult to use for the very people it was supposed to support.
Customers struggled to find product specifications and project information. Internal sales teams struggled too. Many had stopped using the website altogether, relying instead on locally stored PDFs or sending information manually over email.
The issue wasn't a lack of content. It was the structure around it. Over time, the website had grown around the company's internal organization rather than around how customers actually searched for information.
That exposed the real problem: the system wasn't failing because users lacked technical knowledge. It was failing because the information architecture reflected the organization's mental model instead of the users'.
What we found
The more interviews we conducted, the clearer the pattern became.
Customers weren't searching for "solutions" or "products." They were searching based on the vessel they operated and the problem they needed to solve.
But the website expected them to understand Kongsberg Maritime's internal structure before they could navigate it. As a result, users struggled to find relevant information and many abandoned the website entirely in favor of contacting sales directly.
Ironically, the sales teams themselves had already created workarounds — relying on locally stored PDFs because it was faster than navigating the existing structure.
The research helped shift the conversation internally: the challenge was no longer about improving navigation labels. It was about redesigning the information architecture around how users actually think.
What changed
We restructured the website around vessel types and industry segments instead of internal product categories.
Users no longer needed to understand the difference between "solutions" and "products" before they could navigate the site. Instead, the structure started from something they already knew: the type of vessel they operated.
That shift enabled decision-making immediately. Navigation became easier to scan, product relationships became clearer, and users could move through the system with more confidence.
After rollout, the sales teams reported using the website more actively again, replacing many of the manual PDF-based workflows they had relied on before.
Reorganized a complex enterprise website around vessel types and user needs rather than internal product structure
Improved internal navigation, making it easier for employees to find and reference relevant products
Shifted the website from a passive marketing surface to an actively used internal support tool
How I contributed
I worked closely with a senior UX designer on the UX and information architecture work throughout the project.
My role focused on research, navigation structure, and helping translate user insights into clearer design decisions. I conducted interviews and usability evaluations, participated in stakeholder workshops, and created wireframes and structural concepts that explored new ways of organizing the website.
Early in the project, I became particularly interested in the gap between how the organization structured information internally and how users actually searched for it. Interviews with the sales department revealed that even internal teams avoided using the website — which became an important turning point in the project.
A large part of the work involved alignment across stakeholders with different priorities and opinions about ownership, visibility, and categorization. Working alongside the senior designer, I helped connect research findings back to navigation decisions and supported discussions around creating a more user-centered structure.
What I learned
This project reinforced how often enterprise websites mirror organizational charts instead of user mental models.
The biggest challenge was not designing navigation — it was creating alignment around who the website was actually for.
It also highlighted how quickly users create their own workarounds when systems become difficult to navigate. By the time we started the project, both customers and internal teams had already stopped trusting the website as a reliable source of information.
Improving the experience required more than clearer navigation. It required restructuring the system around how users think, not how the organization is divided internally.