Changing navigation content after user logs in

Question

we are currently in the middle of the redesign of our company website.

We have a company website which only contains informations that tells the visitor why our company is great and why he should create a free test account and customers have the option to login on the top right.

Now after a customer logs in, other parts are relevant (where he can actually work), so he will not need the navigation before the login.

Now we had a discussion on how to handle this and currently there are two ideas.

Idea 1: The navigation looks exactly the same but the navigation points are different after logging (horizontal navigation).

Idea 2: Since he wants to work after logging in, we present him a vertical navigation on the left (which he can hide so only icons are shown - if he wants).

In my personal opinion idea 2 has more clarity even though the first time a customer logs in he will see a different navigation (not horizontal anymore) - it won't be hard for him to understand that he's in the working part of the site now.

The only pro argument for the horizontal navigation i heard from my team right now is that it would be consistent to the navigation of the site before the login.

But that's my biggest con, since the user might expect the same content and might wonder why its gone.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this - we will definitely test this in the future but I still want to get some more views so I can talk with my team.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Let me give you a basic example. First of all it’s not wrong to have different navigation after the login.

Whenever you visit any restaurant or shopping mall. They all try hard to show their best. The best slogan, boards and decor just to make you come inside anyhow and once you are inside you deal with different things you perform different action. So before login in any product they just try to explain themselves in the best manner and they try to tell the users about their features etc and the sole reason of making user a login/ signup is let them using the system and product. So according to me this is not wrong anyhow. If user still want to see the store from outside then they would have logout or come out from inside :)

LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter all are the common examples even the product I am working on which is a AI recruitment platform Vasitum.com is having the same use case.