Style.it website

“The traffic on Style.it continues to grow beyond every expectation.” Bruno Ortolani, International Business Developer, CondéNet International.

Condé Nast is an international publishing house headquartered in New York. Its Italian branch runs the magazines Vogue, Vanity Fair and Glamour, which are tremendously important within the Italian fashion and lifestyle culture. The company consolidated the websites that grew out of these magazines into a fashion, lifestyle and entertainment portal for young Italian woman.

Experientia was asked to better understand the lifestyle and entertainment needs of these women, so that the new portal would be developed around their context, needs and aspirations, rather than be based on the assumptions the editorial team held about the interests of these women.

Experientia did a range of structured interviews, tests and card sorting exercises to arrive at these insights and to inform the information architecture, and designed and tested several prototypes to further inform the final design solution.

Understanding
With several websites already existing, Condé Nast realised the importance of understanding exactly what young Italian women really wanted from a consolidated portal. Experientia first investigated whether it would be better to host the separate websites under one umbrella website, or integrate them into one combined website. Together with the company, it was decided to create one, unified website.

There were three main challenges surrounding the design of this website. The first was to better understand the lifestyle and entertainment needs of young Italian women, so that the new portal would be developed around their contexts, needs and aspirations, rather than be based on the assumptions the editorial team held about the interests of these women.

The second challenge was one of flow. A lot of the traffic on the current websites was page-specific, with people exiting the site from the same page they came in on. This was not due to content problems – the sites were content-rich, containing high-quality articles and photos. Rather it was due to poor page layouts and information architecture, and the lack of relationship between material, meaning that women were not drawn to investigate the content further, and to explore the site page to page.

The third challenge was the level of interactivity: Condé Nast wanted to create an online community, with an entertaining and interactive website.

Experientia started with a people-centred approach to gain an understanding of these three issues. We conducted usability tests with 20-30 young women, using formative evaluation, a technique to elicit the new requirements of the website, including previously unknown requirements. Then we carried out a comparative evaluation of existing magazine websites in the market.

We discovered that women felt there was an aspiration gap in terms of the content displayed and their actual lives. The fashion available from the websites was seen as unachievable in people’s daily lives, and a change in focus was needed to remedy this. Increased interaction with the content was one of the key methods we used to reduce this aspiration gap.

The existence of rich content that users were not viewing signalled the need to redesign the navigation system to better exploit the available content.

Design
In participatory sessions with up to 50 women, we redesigned the website navigation system, using our technical skills to realise their suggestions and desires. A card-sorting technique was used to come up with a navigation system based on the women’s own views of major categories and hierarchies.

The redesigned navigation system applied new filtering techniques, including cooperative and collaborative filtering. In the former, when different content is viewed by the same person, links are created between those two different things, offering a richness of association between content. Collaborative filtering is more interactive, with the user evaluating and ranking content to change the priority of its position in a search result.

Guided navigation systems were used to classify content from different perspectives: the same content might be classified into two or more categories, creating greater serendipity of associations, making it more likely that people will browse from one article to the next, and therefore exit from a different page than the one in which they entered the site.

From the insights gained, we designed the information architecture for several potential website portals.

Prototyping and testing
Experientia coordinated the development of three design prototypes. These were then the subjects of a series of user tests. Based on the findings of the validation process, adjustments were made, and the final portal was designed.

Final deliverables – Major success
Following the launch in early 2008, page views on the new site increased four times (unique visitors/month after two months went from 300,000 to 1,200,000).

Moreover, people no longer exited the site where they had entered. As the content already existed in the previous sites, we can attribute this traffic increase solely to the new website design, and particularly to the navigation system.