Ask Jeeves Frontpage
The Ask Jeeves.com frontpage after the 2001 redesign below, showing the folder tabs, three topic sections which could be swapped out for Branded Animations, and an absence of banner ads. In comparison is the pre-2001 homepage below.
The Ask Jeeves.com frontpage after the 2001 redesign above, and the pre-2001 homepage below:
At the same time as my work on the Ask Jeeves visual identity, I was the lead artist on Ask Jeeves' 2001 redesign. The company wanted to showcase more features on its front page, have advertising space with more flexibility (and more income) than simple banner ads, such as the Branded Animation series, and they wanted to showcase the character more than the previous design.The Ask Jeeves.com frontpage after the 2001 redesign below, showing the folder tabs, three topic sections which could be swapped out for Branded Animations, and an absence of banner ads. In comparison is the pre-2001 homepage below.
The Ask Jeeves.com frontpage after the 2001 redesign above, and the pre-2001 homepage below:
Work was done by the marketing department and our creative services department on making the language of sections more "friendly". For example, "Shopping" became "Shopping Guide", the stale name of "Answer Point" turned into "Ask Other People", and a new "Browse by Subject" command was added for showcasing a new indexing technology that the company acquired.
Along with the redesign of the homepage, the Reply Page got a refresh. This is what appears when someone asks a question on the homepage, and it also was the framework around other sections like "Shopping" and "Browse by Subject". Legal questions were resolved with the estate of P.G. Wodehouse, the writer who first created the Jeeves character. This allowed me to finally place the Jeeves character on the Reply Page and other page templates that appear after the homepage.
Ask Jeeves Reply Page
The redesigned reply page above, showing the folder tabs, related search refinements on the righthand side, and new organization. In comparison is the original pre-2001 reply page below.
In comparison to the original reply page is the 2001 redesigned reply page above.
The redesigned reply page above, showing the folder tabs, related search refinements on the righthand side, and new organization. In comparison is the original pre-2001 reply page below.
In comparison to the original reply page is the 2001 redesigned reply page above.
Ask Jeeves originally just focused on its own natural-language search technology, created by David Warthen. These search results appear as questions with a red Ask button to their left, and often a dropdown menu to further clarify the question. Users were lead through a series of questions in this way to get closer to their results. As the company got bigger, it acquired DirectHit, which was a popularity-based search engine; users could rate sites in its directory from a scale of 1-5. After the acquisition, these DirectHit results appeared below the Ask Jeeves results, with the "5 Little Orange Men" from DirectHit's interface appearing after each link and above the brief description.
So, believing that most web users would click on a line of text thats colored blue and underlined, I removed the Ask buttons from the Direct Hit results. The Ask Jeeves search refinement section still needed them as a "submit" button, so those stayed. I tried placing them at the end of every sentence, but it made the page look very disorganized, so I left them to the left of each question as a bullet point.
Related Search Terms were added as a third way for a user to find the answer to their question, and I added them to the right in a column so that users would see them sooner than if they had to scroll through several results of DirectHit... which sometimes gave some very strange responses. That column was also slated for tall banner ads, which would appear below the Related Search Terms.
For typography, I kept the usual Arial/Helvetica/Sans-Serif type, but made entire section headings slightly bigger, in bold, with a 3-pixel-tall beige rule underneath each, and a good amount of white space between one section and another. This made the sections visually separate and easier to scan.
The "5 Little Orange Men" I dropped off of the DirectHit section of the Reply page as more distraction than they were worth.
And finally, for color, the site-wide design used a blue background around a white or light yellow page, that helped users see the page as a distinct graphic element. This made the "folder tabs" at the top more visible than in the past, when they were white links in a blue bar. The blue background gave a rich color to the site that went along with the world of the Jeeves butler character.
