The challenge - Aol’s subscription business was in decline, competitors & social startups were stealing audience attention, and the company needed new ways to grow revenue.
I was brought in as a consultant to look for growth opportunities. I started small focusing on one of their properties, and experimented with ways to enhance the user experience while testing different ways to monetize the business to increase engagement.
Aol had 38 disjointed publishing systems that left users feeling frustrated with how broken the web experience was.
From a user perspective, Aol lacked cohesion. Many of the properties did not look like they were in the Aol family. The lack of consistency led many users to think sites were broken, they would frequently get lost and ultimately bail on the experience through frustration.
As our work proved out success, the foundational site design elements matured into a publishing platform that allowed Aol to scale its business, maintain customer engagement, and grow its Ad revenue stream such that it replaced the subscription business.
Design philosophy
Usefulness
The user experience will be intuitive, easy to learn, fun, inclusive and therefore habitual in nature. Pages will be light and easy to consume, loading quickly, with a clear hierarchy of offerings that the user can delve deeply into.
The content on the sites should inspire users to share their experiences, creating their own, molding the content to fit their needs. The experience should build a sense of community within its users, becoming an integral part of their daily lives.
The site will be divided into editorial pages, applications, and tools – the customer should perceive these functional differences in the visual and interaction design.
As part of the visual language, dimensional accents should be used sparingly to punctuate rich functionality. Interface feedback should be clear, friendly and immediate - the site should be responsive to the users input, always letting them know where they are and what they are doing.
Texture, color, and iconography should be used to enhance the experience, defining AOL as the leader in user interaction design, above the competition. This principle is directly tied to the company’s brand position - “AOL is the internet brand that is on my side.”
Restraint
With restraint in mind, it becomes incumbent upon the design team to constantly ask what features to keep out of the core experience, not what features to add - to keep the experience clean and focused. The visual design approach will embrace a sense of understated restraint, clearly telegraphing meaning and function. Interactive design elements will be kept simple, exposing functionality without cluttering the page.
As the UI is transformed into visual design, the team will look for opportunities to simplify the user experience wherever possible. A guiding question for the visual design will be - ‘is there any design element that can be removed to make the core experience better?’
Exposure of functionality and data is a fundamental premise of the visual design. In the interest of providing clarity, we must not over-complicate the fundamental experience design of any page, tool, or application.
Balance
The balance of advertising and customer experience will be achieved through a practical analysis of page weight, experience design, and business requirements.
We should use the flexibility of the grid to insure the most natural and logical placements for the advertising units. Innovative advertising integrations will be explored as we execute the visual design.
Ownership
The product will empower the customer to save, store, and share content with friends, play audio and video assets in a way that no other site does, build friendships across the service and have fun with the content platform. The web site will enable customers to customize the product to their own functional needs and personal visual style.
With many stakeholders involved, (due to the number of businesses leveraging the publishing platforms), it was critical that we develop a design philosophy early on to maintain clarity, guide decision making, garner early support, and empower teams to develop components for the broader style system as it matured. I was responsible for the initial design thinking approach, drafting the design principles, and setting up the frameworks for the broader design system.
Design system documentation
Platform design
As the design system matured other business teams were able to launch new channels leveraging the components my team had already built. This typically covered 80% of their needs, with the remaining 20% being custom designed with their unique offering in mind. Of course even those “unique” components went through a rigorous design review, as to make them useful to other business units, and eventually to become standard components in the publishing platform. Here you can see a few of the many channels that where developed.
Advertisers were able to purchase many formats, and invest in varying degrees of sponsorship, from small takeovers, to entire ‘reskins’ of channels (including custom content).
