Holiday homepages at Ask.com were a fun ongoing design challenge. Normally clean, white, and paired down the homepage became a showcase on special dates. When we retired the character we used these pages to help differentiate our search engine, build loyalty and to continue the work we had done with Jeeves on earlier homepages.
This program was extremely successful in driving traffic & exposing users to our ‘Smart Answer’ results page which featured very rich direct results above the standard web results and reinforced our value proposition.
These holiday homepages had a strong influence on the development and eventual utilization of the skins feature on the current Ask.com homepage (below).
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One of the advantages of being at Ask for seven years and the small size of our Creative Services dept. (and then Marketing dept.) was the contribution I was able to make to the Ask UI. The results page on Ask X evolved from our earliest reply pages. I was involved in the development of many areas of the current incarnation by doing experiments with layout throughout the years.
Below are examples of some visual experimentation and brainstorming around the results page structure.
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Note- The tab structure, based on a file folder Jeeves held early on was something I contributed to this middle version of the site.
As the site and features developed so did our need for UI innovation which is something that I relished the chance to contribute to.
Below- a mock up requested by Product as we considered logical but elegant ways to reveal our results and content.
Through many such projects and intense periods of design experimentation I made a significant contribution to the evolution of the innovative results page below which is now the crux of the Ask.com advertising and main point of differentiation from other search sites.
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Generally when we would purchase a company such as we did with Etours there would be a thougthful exploration of how best to incorporate that brand into the Ask Jeeves experience. I was involved in many of these processes. This was a mocked up directional proposal below. At this point I was also trying to extend the idea and metaphor of Jeeves through logo and Iconography.
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I did many templates for ‘Voice of Jeeves’ treatments so we would have a consistent visual approach for the character’s ‘voice’ throughout the site.
For example, visually we always tried to avoid cartoon bubbles etc. as way to pull Jeeves closer to human and away from cartoon. As the character evolved so did the rules around his use both on the site, in online advertising and in or offline efforts as well.
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I designed a large Brand Library for our visual assets and guidelines. It was a successful way to communicate our brand internally and as password protected link to our partners. This was a deep resource and tied into a printed version, but was most successful as an online document that grew as we did. I was heavily involved in the creation and maintenance of this document.
This is a screen grab during the developement of the site.
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I did a ton of visual experimentation around various ‘degrees’ of Jeeves to help inform the dialog and debate on whether to keep the character. Including this one that reduced Jeeves down to a simple graphic element.
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We also worked on many ‘one off’ mini sites to feed demand for information on events like the Winter Olympics (note the careful omission of the word Olympics to avoid copyright issues!). These were an opportunity to do something different than, but related to the main site and reinforce the personality of our site at the time and on a business level to showcase some valued Expedia ad units ;)! Good Times.
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Did lots of this kind of tool bar kind of stuff. ‘Branding within a crushingly restrictive format’!
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