Nav experience that follows user through site navigation

[JasonHowellSlavin]

Hello!

I would love your input on a feature request. We've already vetted it through authoring and our stakeholders, but wanted to see if the community had any insight/concerns/feedback on our approach.

The desired feature is to have specific navigation experiences follow a user through the site (MWPW-141010). For instance, if a user navigates to a product page, and then from that page navigates to a resource page on b.a.com, they should retain the navigation from the product page they visited. There are additional variations based on the user journey, but that is the basic ask.

Our idea was to utilize metadata.xlsx to allow for pages to either be "entry" points for this journey or allow their nav's to be changed dynamically ("on" setting). For "entry" points, the current gnav-source will be stored in sessionStorage. For "on" pages, we will check if there is a gnav-source in sessionStorage, and if so, replace the gnav-source in metadata before the gnav loads. Anywhere that does not have the dynamic nav set to "on" or "entry" we will clear the sessionStorage. The desired experience is to occur in a single tab, so we are not worrying about multiple tabs etc.

You can see our outline for user journeys and workflow on this miro board. (edited)

[overmyheadandbody]

I'm not sure excluding other tabs is the right approach, though. Cmd + Click, Scroll wheel click, opening a new tab from the context menu, opening the same page in another tab might all lead to some odd behaviors. Are session cookies not an option? The stored data should be minimal enough and you get consistent data/behavior across tabs.

[JasonHowellSlavin]

That is a good point. It was chosen by our stakeholders and we may have nudged them in that direction due to concerns over expiry. For instance if a user comes from an email campaign to a page, we would not want them to get the stored nav. If we used a cookie or localStorage, I suppose we could check with our stakeholders an appropriate amount of time for expiration, perhaps coming from average session lengths.

I can bring this concern back to them and it should find its ways into the implementation.