The resurrection of a portal
Lycos Europe is one of the old portals on the Internet. It has a history and unlike many other dot com companies it made it through the IT bubble fairly unharmed, but it's also a portal which had not evolved very much from 1998 to 2002.
As head of design in Jubii, one of the companies, which Lycos acquitted in 1998, I had a hard time overlooking that. I worked on a European product called "My Lycos" and was not very happy with the design, which the Design Competent Center (DCC) in Germany was going to put on it.
I don't know if it was because I had made a big fuss about this, but in 2001 I was invited to Germany to help redesign the portal. The task was not an easy one, because we only had two and half days to redesign the portal.
Our first attempt was not very successful, partly because the other designer and I, a young Frenchman, worked separately instead of working as a group. Our efforts therefore were far too fragmented and didn't really correspond. This was the poor result of our first two days' work:
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| Trying to help |
I returned to Denmark after two and a half days, rather unhappy with our work, and quickly opted to change our way of working. First of, I quickly came up with another dummy for Lycos, just to have a starting point. It looked like this:
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| Codename Zebra |
I flame mailed this to all top persons in Lycos and suggested some radical changes within the whole design work process. Let's just say that I was a little unsure about what was going to happen next. I had a feeling that I was either going to be fired or promoted. Luckily, it was the last, and I was promoted to Creative Director of Lycos Europe, which is still my job today
When I did take over the design at Lycos Europe, this was what met my eyes: Good old HTML design, good enough for a portal build in 1998, but not for a portal in the beginning of 2002. So, for me it was first of all a race against time to get something online to show that new times had begund, to make my mark so to say.
But changing the design on a very big Portal like Lycos is not something you do overnight, so I had to have a plan to crack this problem.
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Homepage 2002 and Shopping 2002
What I had to deal with. |
The idea I had was: Imagine Lycos being an old house you've just bought, but you don't have the time to rebuild it the way you'd like to. But you still need to be able to live there, until you have the time to rebuild. What do you do? Simply paint the walls and repair the worst. After that you take a breather and prepare for the big rebuild. In short, my plan for Lycos was to repaint the portal now and rebuild it later.
The repainting begins
At first some very fast remakes were done to see if we were able to stay yellow and black, but I found it almost impossible to create something good with those two colours. I had to convince Lycos to change from only having yellow and black to using more colours.
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| Shopping updated and CommSuite updated |
In these two examples you can see the changes I made to make the portal better than it was. By clearing and reorganising the content in the original design, and getting rid of minor errors, it became a better page. Also note that no extra content has been added, only a clear up has been done to these examples.
Take shopping e.g; here the overall top has been changed to: fit in the banner and the content to move up. I also tried to use half size banners to reduce the ad space. The Icons have been made more prominent and logical, boxes have been added to the content areas, and a clear headline is used. The picture used in the original design was not very good, because it was hard to see what it was, so I changed it alongside some changes to the first content box itself.
Small updates have been done to the Featured Items but it is more or less the same. The right bar has been redone for the user to understand what is happening here. It was very hard to see that the top companies (PC World and Commet) were part of the "Lycos Quality Parter" shops, so by changing this in the updated version, it's mush easier to see. Also just changing the size of the logos to the same width helps to clean up the site.
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| Shopping 2002 vs Shopping updated |
Still, it was clear to me that this was not good enough. Even though it was a repaint, I needed to go one step further, and thus the idea to get away from using just two colors came up. There was some scepticism to this, because the two color scheme had up until now been an integral part of the Lycos brand. I cracked this problem by introducing some basic color ideas and showing my colleagues how to use the colorwheel. The colorwheel is a way of showing how colors match or contrast each other. By drawing a geometric figure in this colorwheel it's possible to get a set of colors which match each other perfectly.
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| Understanding colors using the colorwheek |
Next came a set of designs which were meant as an icebreaker. To get people's minds going, on whether it was possible to change the design radically. These were never meant as designs to go online, but just to open the "boundaries".
  
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| Shopping 2002 vs Shopping updated |
It worked - I was able to convince Lycos that an extra color, light blue, was a good idea and even a new way of design was a possibility, as shown here.
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| Release Candidate 1 |
This is what I call the Release Candidate 1. This design came very close to going online, online tests were done and showed (if you believe in online tests ;-) that it was a good design, which people liked. But then something happened - I made up my mind that tabs were the future for Lycos as core navigation, and that changed the game somewhat.
The problem with my theory was, that if I didn't know what I was going to do in the rebuild, the repainting was like painting in a room without light, making changes that weren't anything like what I wanted them to be later, wasting a lot of good time. So, at that point I was working in two parallel universes. One with the problem ahead of me, the repainting, the other trying simultaneously to look into the crystal bowl to see what Lycos was going to look like one year from now.
In a perfect world the repainting was going to be a first version of the rebuilding, starting to use some of the design ideas for the rebuilding already while repainting. This would help the users understand the rebuilding once it came out, and would help Lycos change more smoothly and gradually.
The first idea to this rebuild was about navigation. What Lycos was very "good at" was hiding information and services for its users, a lot "better" than our competitor. And I was determined to change this to ensure that no mater where on the Lycos portal you were, it was possible to go from one service to another in only two clicks.
I also had the feeling that a lot of our users used one of our services, but were not aware or exposed to what other good services we had in the same area. That if you used our mail, for instance, you didn't know about the free sms service we also had, or vice versa. All of these problems were covered with the tab navigation system. The easy cross navigation and the possibility to expose users to other products that were there.
I often felt it hard to stand up in a meeting and get 15 people to understand a complex problem like tab navigation, and at the same time get them to see the simplicity of it, so I produced a flash dummy to show the concept to them. It was a massive success and is online today. This a good tip, I'd like to pass on, don't expect others to see the vision as clearly as yourself, sometimes it's better to start low and then build up slowly to an understanding of your idea, instead of just jumping to the conclusion right away, because its so clear in you head. Start low and go slow.
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| Click to try the Flash dummy |
So now we had the Release Candidate and the future prototype. The first plan was to try and combine the two and get as much as possible online in the first repaint. Our first test in trying to combine the two, we utterly and completely failed. It was a massive disaster. It was clear that the two were not directly compatible and needed a series of rework to be able to function together.
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| Massive disaster |
So after going backwards and forwards a million times with different variation, we ended up with this.
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| What got online, finally |
The final repaint design - and people loved it! When shown for the first time to the whole European sales force, people clapped their hands for 5 minutes straight in praise of the design - I had people coming up to me after the design was put online, telling me that after this repaint they were proud to come to work.
That is how much a simple repaint can do for a company. And some of you will undoubtedly say: Okay, it was good, but not THAT good, and I must agree with you. But if you remember what we came from, maybe you can understand why this was such a big change for many people. I also think this repaint had a greater impact on Lycos internally the on our users. But nevertheless, the figures coming back for this repaint were overwhelmingly good.
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