Why Creative Boom’s navigation now starts with a verb

One thing I’ve always found difficult with Creative Boom is its navigation. Determining what each section should be named. Figuring out the right topics and series. I might be overthinking it, but I like to organise content in a way that makes sense to our readers. And, as I’ve learned the hard way, it’s not as easy as you might expect.

That organisation has changed so much since I launched the platform 17 years ago. For much of that time, search and SEO meant you had to be quite literal. Our news section was always called News, and our inspiration was Inspiration. We followed Steve Krug’s whole “don’t make me think” rule of UI design. And for many years, it worked.

But with AI and LLMs, everything is shifting towards more “intent-based” ordering. That means anticipating what a visitor needs and taking them down that path. So now we’re opting for the ‘Keep Up’ and ‘Get Inspired’ route. We are reading the minds of those who land on our site and giving them an obvious place to start.

Along with these two intents, we have ‘Get Ahead’, ‘Find Work’, and ‘Find Your People’. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think we’re the first of our kind to adopt this new(ish) approach. Looking at our competitors, most I know still use the classic noun-based navigation.

So why move away from it ourselves? Because of how people find Creative Boom now. For years, Google sent us a big chunk of visitors, and sections with literal names helped the search engines to understand what we’re about. These days, most people land on a single article via our newsletter, Instagram or LinkedIn, or increasingly from asking an LLM a question. Yes, we get a lot of direct traffic to our homepage, but anyone new needs to know instantly how we can help.

That random person doesn’t think in nouns anymore; they think in verbs. They’ve come to do something. Our old menu listed what we had. The new one lists what we’re here for.

‘Keep Up’ is for anyone who wants to know what’s happening right now. That might be industry news, who’s moved where, or the latest typefaces. Even how AI is changing things. ‘Get Inspired’ is the work itself and the thinking behind it. ‘Get Ahead’ is our tips and resources section, and ‘Find Work’ is our jobs board. Finally, ‘Find Your People’ brings together our online community, The Studio, with our in-real-life social events for creatives.

I wish I could tell you all of the above was an easy month or two of work. It wasn’t. News disappeared but came back. Inspiration was renamed to Work, and then we realised we still needed a hub for all things inspirational. We’ve been back and forth on so many things; it’s not entirely obvious we’ve got it right.

And that’s the thing. We don’t know if it’ll work. I’ll watch how people explore Creative Boom and listen to any user feedback. We’re in a strong position to make changes quickly, whenever we want. What I do know is that it’s pretty terrifying to take a platform that has followed the status quo for nearly two decades and give it a more radical navigation. So have a click around and tell me what you think.