Business Opportunity: From 1997 through 1999, Lycos grew very quickly through a series of company acquisitions and mergers. This created a variety of user experience design challenges including branding, global navigation, and site integration issues. In 1999, I was selected as member of the first Lycos Network Design Group. This group focused on defining standards for the entire Lycos network of sites, including information architecture, navigation design, interaction design, and visual design.

Process and Solution: The first task in the style guide effort was to do an inventory of all the products and services offered on Lycos. From this list, products were categorized into four groups - Content, Interactive, Publishing and Search. A expert analysis was conducted on each product in group to identify both effective and inaffective user experiencs. I was principally responsible for reviewing all the products in the interactive products group (Mail, Message Boards, etc).

From this investigation, best practices were identifed which would serve as the basis for the development of common framework for the information architecture, navigation, interaction design, and visual styling.

Primary goals for this framework were:

• Create a flexible information architecture that allows for each product to satisfy it's unique business goal.
• Allow for increased and consistant advertising opportunities across all products
• Develop a component system that simplifies the integratation of common components across multiple products, i.e. stock quotes
• Provide a visual styling guide (fonts usage, color, branding) that allows for individual product identity and personality
• Create a navigation system that can be adapted to both content and interactive products
• Define interaction workflow standards so users understand the use of applications across the network
• Provide a library of common visual icons and buttons
• Provide a central depository where information about the style guide can be found, including downloading templates and icons.

Using a process of iterative design and analysis, prototypes for each product group were developed using the new style guide. Included with these prototypes were a list of best practices for front-end developent.

Benefits: The establishment of a consistent user experience across the Lycos network provided improved integration between the various products, an improved understanding of the products offered on Lycos by it's users, a consistant advertising offering, and increase efficiency through re-use of components previously developed.

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Additional case studies:

Kaiser Permanente: Web-based Clinical Records
Lycos.com: Creating a Global Style Guide
Lycos Mail: Interaction Design for Online Communications