Jodene Eikenberry
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Classmates.com
In 2001 memberships drove approximately 75% of business revenues. The Class List page was the primary driver of sales for Classmates.com. This page provides the backbone of the Classmates business model by providing the names of former classmates to incent non-paying users to buy a subscription.
This essential page squandered precious above-the-fold real estate with ineffective marketing messaging. It lacked a coherent system for distinguishing between content and advertising. The Classmates product road map required the page to support new features such as additional contact categories, more robust profiles, photos, personal websites, individual to group comparisons, as well as functions such as better pagination and contextual advertising opportunities.
I worked closely with a Product Manager to design a page template that could scale for the 18-24 months. One of the first changes was to implement a tab system to handle various category content types. The tab design afforded a clear area for implementing variable year range filters and a smarter pagination system. Next was the creation of a content block system for marketing that (while still above the fold) contained messaging in coherent blocks that complimented the list itself. The layout of each list row was redesigned to better accommodate the growing set of user generated content features. Contextual advertising was incorporated into the list itself, providing a major new advertising stream. Lastly an icon legend was added.
The process of redesigning this page was one of the few times at Classmates where the project schedule afforded time for multiple iterations driven by a product development process. The process created a very successful redesign.
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