Lycos.com Case Study

In early 2000, the Lycos.com search engine and portal site was facing an industry-wide problem. Their product had achieved incredible popularity - some 40 percent of the Internet audience was visiting the site each month, and traffic growth was still exponential. Yet the product had grown out of control and with an organic chaos that was dramatically affecting the brand perception. Nearly 100 distinct products representing millions of individual pages were aggregated under the Lycos umbrella, and few shared a consistent, user-centered interface and architecture. The result was a befuddling variety of navigational and functional solutions all attempting to part of a unified user experience.

Prior to joining Adaptive Path, partner Jeffrey Veen led a team of information architects, designers, and engineers in a 6-month project to evaluate and alleviate the large-scale inconsistency suffered at Lycos.com. The team combed through thousands of prototypical pages, identifying and cataloging the types of information and user tasks across the myriad products. The team then set about designing interface components based on a patterned approach - rather than attempting a top-down redesign of every page of every project, the team focused on similarities between types of information and generated abstracted solutions. Thus, a component being used to display stock quotes could also be leveraged to display weather forecasts. The interface for displaying the top ten most popular rap singles was used for breaking news headlines.

In the end, the team delivered a set of 18 standardized components to be used across the Lycos Network. Some were flexible enough to be used in a variety of settings, while others - like branding collateral in page headers or advertising units - were rigorously consistent across all products. A style guide was developed to aid in site-wide deployment, but the team also realized that documentation is seldom sufficient for implementation. To spread the components more effectively throughout the network, the team also developed a backend publishing system based on published XML vocabularies. For busy producers with limited resources, this meant compliance with the style guide was as simple as converting content into a well-documented schema, rather than forcing a complete redesign. In the end, switching to the component library was simpler than continuing to hack together a non-compliant site, and one-by-one products switched over.