Epinions launched in the Fall of 1999 to heady .com buzz. By the time I joined in January 2000, the company had been incredibly successful at fostering a passionate community of writers.

The Redesign & The Slump

In 2000, the company still needed to increase the number of reviews on the site. To accomplish this goal, we built features that catered to the writer and refined the micropayment system to pay them for their work. It seemed to work - we had an obsessive community to show for it.

However, the site still needed some work. It wasn't cohesive, had poor navigation and was darn ugly - just what you'd expect from a product team operating in a fast development environment without a styleguide. Then the outlook for the tech sector was began to sour. It became clear that a company that focused on a community of writers (without additional rounds of funding) would not survive a market correction.

Solution

So early in 2000, our little UI team (peterme, gperez, tpodd and myself) began work on a site redesign. This happened in tandem with a new product team focus on the shopper (as opposed to just the writer).

Our writing community was very vocal - they told us what they wanted from the site and what they didn't like. Shoppers were a different story.

To understand what a shoppers needed, we conducted a spate of usability activities. We ran user testing. We examined server logs. We made user models. We did task analysis. We prototyped various solutions to problems. Finally, we tested and iterated those prototypes. The result of our efforts finally launched in Q3 of 2000. The Epinions 2.0 site was tailored to tasks in the shopping process: browsing for products, sifting through choices, researching a product in depth, reading product category information, returning to find an alternate product or purchasing.

Examples from the project

Skills

More work I did at Epinions...