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

However, the site still needed some work (it wasn’t cohesive, had poor navigation and needed polish). In early 2000, our small UI team began work on a site redesign. 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.

Examples from the project

Design

Our overall design goals for the site was to create a clean, modular, and consistent site. The simpler design would recede allowing the recommended content and products from the community stand out. Site modules were categorized and designed according to their function – modules relating to user input and the community had one consistent treatment, modules relating to products and recommendations had another treatment.

• Browse screens from the styleguide
• Browse an example module type from the styleguide

Research

It might sound obvious, but understanding the way that people shop was critical to supporting the shoppers’ tasks.

Researching a product to buy is a very complicated process. The way that you shop differs by product type (travel goods vs. consumer electronics), the amount of the purchase (cheap vs. expensive) and the context of your shopping. We had two data points to build out a model of shopping – user interviews and site logs. After building out a few different models, we settled on one overarching model that could guide the site architecture.

• See a larger view of the shopping model (13k PDF)

Community and recommendations

Collaborative filtering on Epinions used several data points – your rating of content and products on the website, the people you trust rating, and the wider community’s ratings all affected the content any user would see.

• View an example web of trust from a shopper’s account
• View a writer’s account page

Skills

• Information architecture, UI design and Visual design
• HTML / CSS development
• Discount usability practices and site analysis