Rethinking Content Structure and Navigation

If you haven’t noticed yet, we revamped the whole navigation structure here at Matexperience.com. It was a result of a very long process of self-reflection, many hours of thinking and talking with people in attempt to improve the usability of the website, allow people to navigate to the content they want to read with ease and make it more intuitive and straightforward in general. Let me share what has changed and why, and take you a bit through the thought process that went into these changes.

When I first started Matexperience, my initial desire was to publish yerba mate reviews. The more I was drinking mate, the more I tried different brands, types and blends, the more I realized how complex and gourmet yerba mate is. I wanted to create a catalog of yerba mate reviews, organize my thoughts in one place, make it easy to navigate and explore. None of the existing tools, such as Google Docs or any of the social media were sufficient for me to create a useful convenient resource that I can refer to. That’s how this website was born — an outlet for my passion for yerba mate.

While it was growing, people started to reach out to me, I got new acquaintances and connections. Matexperience allowed me to dive deeper into this hobby and lifestyle than I ever thought is possible. I tried new things, reflected on stuff that I tested out before, and soon realized that publishing reviews is not enough, and in order to truly encompass the whole scale of the yerba mate world, I need to cover much broader scope of topics related to mate. I wanted to share things that I learned from my experience, stuff that I tried that other people recommended and that worked for me, and in general provide people with a more comprehensive resource where everything is in one place.

In last few years I started to publish new types of content under the sections Education and Insights. Education section was supposed to contain, well, educational content with comprehensive guides on things related to yerba mate, tips and tricks for preparing it, answers for frequently asked questions, and busting common myths and misconceptions. Insights section was supposed to contain a more subjective, personal and observational content, such as news from yerba mate industry, editorials and opinions, as well as personal stories from readers about their first-time experiences with mate and how it changed something in their lives.

I liked that format at the time, and it helped me to structure my thoughts and ideas for new articles, but recently I have been constantly reflecting on whether it was intuitive enough for the people who are new to the website and yerba mate in general. Is it easy to understand and navigate? Is it obvious to visitors what kind of content you can expect in those sections at a glance? Am I complicating things too much? Are you, the reader, interested in reading a specific format of an article, as opposed to a specific topic?

I asked these questions to myself, did some research, polled multiple different people. As a result, I decided to streamline and simplify the structure of the content on the website. From now on, there will be just two major sections — Reviews and Insights. Reviews are left unchanged; Insights, however, will now encompass everything that was previously in Education section. I feel like every advice, guide, answer to a common question or pretty much any bit of wisdom that is published here on Matexperience is a form of an insight, that comes from either my experience, or experiences of other people, that either inspire me to try and test out certain ideas myself, or are featured as is. I am just a gringo who discovered mate pretty much on accident, who has been enjoying it for many years, made mistakes, got frustrated at something, learned from those mistakes, spoke to people, exchanged experiences and got inspired to continue sharing it with the world. Furthermore, I never claimed to be an expert, nor Matexperience was designed as some sort of the ultimate one-and-only source of truth on everything related to yerba mate, so I came up to the conclusion that having a separate Education section is not conveying the true implication of the content on Matexperience.

In the same vein, I also felt that breaking down content by the categories, such as Guides, Stories, Tips & Tricks, News, etc. was not something that is intuitive and useful to people who want to learn more about yerba mate or who want to get inspired about certain aspect of mate experience. But I still feel that having these categories is useful in case you want to read just personal stories from other people, or you interested in news from the yerba mate industry, or you want to learn some little tips and tricks to take your mate game to the next level.

So, from now on, everything that went and will go into the Insights section will fall into one of the following topics:

• Yerba Mate, where we will discuss everything you need to know about yerba mate from the Ilex Paraguariensis plant to elaborated product ready to be enjoyed.
• Accessories, where we’ll share everything you need to know about must-have and optional accessories for drinking mate, as well as storing, carrying and preparing yerba mate.
• Preparation, where we will talk about everything you need to know about various ways of preparing yerba mate.
• Culture, where we’ll explore origins and history of yerba mate, its cultural impact, mate etiquette and regional customs.
• Health, where we will discover everything you need to know about the effect mate drink has on body and mind, as well as science-backed health impact of yerba mate and its composition.

As for categories, they will now be accessible via a floating action button in the Insights section in the lower right corner of the screen. These are remained unchanged, with addition of a new category called Spotlight, where you will find observations and thoughts on specific narrow subjects related to yerba mate, individual brands and notable figures from an outside perspective, and Opinion category, where I will share my personal ideas and subjective thoughts about yerba mate.

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Hopefully the new changes will not distract or confuse you, and you’ll find them intuitive and useful for navigating content on Matexperience. Please share this resource with your friends who are interested in yerba mate, and let us know what they think about it! Also, if you have any questions, feedback or criticism regarding new content structure, I would love to hear from you. Post a comment under this post, hit me up at , or DM us on any of your favorite social media platform. Salud!