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What: User needs drive a novel approach to organizing content

I was orginally contracted (through Ikonic Interactive) to produce and design the information architecture and user interface for the Microsoft Windows Family of Sites. The Windows sites were a great success, but I felt that there was a larger issue: Microsoft.com was so unorganized that finding the Windows sites was extremely difficult.

The Challenge: In early 1996, Microsoft.com was an unruly site that had no consistent look, feel, navigation or global toolbar. It was roughly 125,000 pages in size, all run off of different servers with different points of login and types of navigation — overall an extremely poor user experience. Users were unhappy, and Microsoft was not being successful in achieving their "web-first" marketing goal.

My Role: Based on my experience designing the Windows Family of Sites, I wrote a proposal to Rob Schoeben, then VP of the PBS group, outlining a re-architecture of Microsoft.com as whole. The proposal included adding a global utility bar, consistent content navigation and user-friendly "web-zine" points of entry into the site that would help users find what they needed in a convenient and helpful fashion. The idea was floated up to Steve Bush in the I/Net Systems Group. Before I knew it, I had an apartment in Redmond, where I spent the next 8 months working on campus to re-architect the Micrsoft.com web site.

The Results: These pages show the pilot "web-zine" that we built for System Professionals, now called TechNet. Still in existence on the Microsoft.com site today, these "zines" - now called Customer Sites - have become the primary method by which users move through the site. Amazingly, my original design, created in 1996, is now still implemented in an almost identical fashion. www.microsoft.com