Jodene Eikenberry
portfolio
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Classmates.com
The original Classmates navigation system revolved around four primary categories of Friends, Reunion, Games and Member Benefits that were closed until clicked upon. The Friends category label held 90% of the revenue generating capacity, but was treated equally with the other three categories. Additonally, emerging business models in the Military and Social Networking units were hidden as local navigation to “Friends.”
This highly prioritized important project was to remedy flaws to the Classmates business model by redesigning the websites primary and secondary navigation. Given six weeks to complete this vital project, I choose to focus on the information architecture and let the design follow industry standards.
The navigation scheme promoted all the affiliation directories to a global level. Our primary business driver, "Schools", became the home page and local navigation was displayed upon entering the site, allowing users to view affiliations and options without clicking. This system was applied to all primary navigation channels so that users would be exposed to far more content and options with far less clicks.