MGM Resorts INT'l
Web Discovery

Helping resort guests find something unforgettable.

Abstract

A complete redesign of web navigation, brand and resort homepages, product category pages, product detail pages, and more—all powered by the brand new Vega design system.

Deliverables

Web navigation

Parent brand homepage

Resort brand homepages

Product category pages

Product detail pages

Role

Product designer

Content designer

Information architecture

An all-new web experience for the MGM Resorts brand and its resorts.

Resort subdomains

Navigation menus

Product categories

400+

Restaurant pages

100+

Entertainment pages

A new navigation...times twenty

Between the parent brand, 20 resorts, and myriad dining, entertainment, gaming, pool, retail, and wellness options, the MGM Resorts domain hosts over 3,500 pages. But the navigation structure gave no visibility into the hierarchy, forcing guests into a trial-and-error approach.

We rearchitected the navigation to expose extra levels of hierarchy in a dropdown menu. Guests with a broader scope in mind could select a category or sub-category, while those seeking a specific endpoint could confidently get there.

Research insights

Product categories as the first level of navigation

Having a single main navigation item, for example “Products,” for accessing all the product categories introduces an excessive navigation layer in the top hierarchy and makes it difficult to begin product browsing.

Visually indicate category relationships

Users easily get overwhelmed and have a hard time scanning category lists when the actual hierarchy isn’t indicated by a visual hierarchy. Use clickable titles and headers with differentiated styles to indicate relationships.

Dropdown menu with intelligent hover

Selecting the correct main navigation option often requires the user to know what it contains, leading the majority who don’t know on a detour when selecting the wrong main menu item.

Minimize courtesy navigation

Courtesy navigation can clutter the page and main navigation, making it more difficult to browse products. Courtesy navigation should be visually separated from the main product navigation and grouped thematically.

Avoid over-categorization

Don’t make people pick a sub-category when they may want to choose a broader scope. Use filtering to narrow down within a category where options aren’t mutually exclusive.

Highlight the current scope in the main navigation

Users need to know where they currently are in the site hierarchy, especially when coming from off-site. Users will feel disoriented if they can’t identify their place in the site structure.

Navigation

Communicate the vibe

Existing resort homepages were simply a collection of cards for product offerings at each location or brand-wide offers—saying next to nothing about what makes each resort unique or worth booking.

With this redesign and the implementation of our new design system, we placed extra focus on using content as our key lever for communicating the unique experience at each resort—without doing custom styles, components, or pages for each.

Old resort page

New resort page

+8%

Combined traffic to booking

+20%

Traffic to booking (mobile)

+2.5%

Conversion rate

+3%

Average order value

Discovering the perfect experience from thousands of choices

Las Vegas is a destination of massive scope and scale. Our guests needed a better way to navigate the hundreds of restaurants and entertainment options at MGM Resorts destinations. We redesigned category landing pages to introduce better filtering, give more hierarchy to offerings, and tie in relevant messaging for MGM Rewards.

We also redesigned a new template for product pages, featuring a large-scale restructuring of product content details to ensure guests could find what they were looking for.