feed
Information Architecture Redesign
Company: Continente
Product: Information architecture - Continente feed
Timeline: 2024
Team
Product Manager, Data Analyst, Designer
Goal:
Reduce user hesitation and improve
clarity in the loan application journey.
Introduction
Continente Feed is the content platform of Continente, one of Portugal's largest supermarket chains. The platform combines editorial content — recipes, tips, product news, and lifestyle articles — with direct e-commerce integration, allowing users to discover content and take purchase actions without leaving the experience.
Despite having a clear engagement potential, the platform had grown organically over time, accumulating assets, links, and sections that lacked strategic coherence. The challenge was not just to reorganize what existed — but to audit the entire digital ecosystem, define what truly belonged on the platform, and create a navigation structure that reflected real user behavior and business priorities.
The Problem
Over time, Continente Feed had accumulated a large number of assets and links — some pointing to external sites with little relevance, others representing inactive projects still visible to users. The navigation reflected this accumulation, with categories and subcategories that were difficult to scan and that mixed high-engagement content with institutional links that generated almost no interaction.
Users didn't always understand why certain things were there. The result was a platform that had strong content at its core — particularly recipes, the highest engagement section — but a navigation structure that made it hard to find and harder to trust.
Research & Discovery
Understanding how users actually navigated the platform was the foundation of every decision made in this project.
User Interviews
Fifteen users were individually interviewed in moderated remote sessions. Participants were recruited with a shopping voucher incentive and asked to share their screen while talking through how they used the platform — what they looked for, how often they visited, and what they did after reading content.
The sessions were intentionally open-ended, allowing users to navigate freely rather than follow a script. This approach revealed not just usability issues, but also genuine motivations — what content users valued, which sections they ignored, and where they felt confused or lost.
Asset Audit
In parallel, a full audit of the platform's assets was conducted — mapping every section, link, and external redirect connected to Continente Feed. This process uncovered assets that had no clear purpose in the current experience, including links to inactive projects and external sites with no promotional context. Decisions on what to keep, restructure, or remove were made collaboratively with the product team, based on a combination of user feedback and engagement data provided by the analytics team.
Competitive Benchmark
Competitor platforms were also analyzed to identify navigation patterns and content structures that worked well in similar contexts. Annotations were made directly on competitor screenshots, comparing specific decisions — such as how other supermarket chains handled institutional content — with the existing Continente Feed structure.
Some Benchmark notes
The Solution
With a clear picture of user behavior and platform priorities, the work moved into restructuring the information architecture from the ground up.
Asset Prioritization
Based on the research findings, each existing asset was evaluated against two criteria: user engagement and strategic relevance. Assets that generated consistent interaction — such as recipes, product news, and promotional content — were kept and given appropriate prominence. Assets with no engagement and no active purpose, such as links to inactive community projects or context-free external redirects, were removed entirely.
New Information Architecture
A new sitemap was created in FigJam, defining the platform's content hierarchy and establishing clear rules for what lived inside Continente Feed versus what should exist as a contextual link — only appearing when relevant, such as during an active promotion.
The navigation was redesigned in Figma, organizing content into thematic categories on the left side of the menu, while the three highest-engagement destinations — Recipes, News, and Liga Portugal — were given persistent top-level visibility. Utility links such as store locations, promotional leaflets, and brand information were grouped separately, giving them a clear and consistent home without competing with editorial content.
Before & After
The restructured navigation reduced visual noise significantly, replacing an inconsistent grid of institutional icons with a coherent, scannable menu that reflects how users actually think about and use the platform.
Before
After (menu activated)
Results & Current Status
The redesigned information architecture is currently live on the Continente Feed platform. The new navigation structure reflects the core outcomes of the research and design process — a cleaner, more intentional experience that connects users to the content they actually value.
What Changed
The platform went from a navigation that mixed editorial content, institutional assets, and context-free external links into a structured experience with clear hierarchy. High-engagement content — particularly recipes — gained appropriate prominence, while low-engagement institutional assets were either removed or repositioned to appear only in relevant contexts.
The "Mundo Continente" hub, which had accumulated a large number of inconsistent icons and links over time, was replaced by a focused utility section grouping only the most relevant institutional touchpoints — store locations, promotional leaflets, and brand information.
User Research Validation
The decisions behind the new architecture were grounded in direct user feedback from 15 moderated interview sessions. Users consistently pointed to confusion caused by irrelevant or context-free content in the navigation — the same friction points that the redesign directly addressed.
Next Steps
With the new structure live, the next phase involves tracking user behavior through analytics to validate the architectural decisions with real usage data — measuring content discovery rates, navigation drop-off points, and conversion from editorial content to purchase actions.