Jodene Eikenberry
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Classmates.com
Classmates initial business model was built around reconnecting students. Originally the database was limited to high schools; later it was expanded to include the K-9 and college years. Soon after I joined the company in 2001, Classmates chose to expand the core business of “reconnecting old friends” to a new realm of the workplace. As the lead UI designer, I was tasked with creating the UI for this new channel.
The most challenging aspect to this project was the process of affiliating users to their workplaces, While high schools were a known and limited quantity, the definition of “workplace” encompassed self-employed individuals, small companies, and behemoth enterprises of thousand of employees. Classmates purchased a database with over a million company names, but we knew it was just a beginning. The UI needed to lead the user through a process of either matching with a pre-defined workplace listing or creating their own as easily and intuitively as possible.
Additionally the project required a redesigned of the user’s core "My Classmates" page where each of their affiliations were listed. The redesign needed to be simple enough to scale through a two year Classmates road map which planned expansions into several other affiliation/reconnection models.
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