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  y January, 2000 mySimon had emerged as the preeminent comparison shopping site on the web. As the site's userbase grew each month, so too did the company's ambitions for the site. New features, functionality, and content were imagined by the site's creative and marketing departments, and it quickly became apparent that a wholesale redesign of the site -- including the way it looked, worked, and was architected -- was essential to the site's continued growth.As part of the effort to rebuild the site's user interface, mySimon engaged me for what was initially to be a month-long study of the site's existing UI. The task was daunting. The existing site was made up of over a thousand HTML templates, with little consistency in design, layout, or functionality among any two pages of the site. Nine months later, I had not only written a complete user interface specification, but designed a new user interface and built a 150 page clickable prototype of the new site to match. Designed in collaboration with mySimon's Creative, Product Marketing, and Production Engineering teams, the new site features a simplified, modular page layout, a more logical site hierarchy, robust new personalization features, a redesigned search engine, and extensive content provided by the company's new Editorial staff. To help the company's in-house creative team maintain and evolve the site over time, I also produced a 20 page online Style Guide that documented the site's UI principles and provided specific coding examples.  |
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