Task
The community website wis.dm is a Web 2.0 startup in Boston. At the time core collaborated with wis.dm, they had a staff of around ten people. Core consulted them in design, user experience, usability and information architecture and provided solutions for their identity, web development and interface design.
The original idea of wis.dm was a mixture of community features, somewhere between Facebook with Digg-like functionality.
Wis.dm had asked core for creative direction and consulting, but in the end they decided to hire a graphic designer.
None of the executed design work from core was directly applied by wis.dm, but the consulting had a lot of influence and provided help and direction for wis.dm. In its most recent version, wis.dm applied many of the design principles and learnings we had discussed in video sessions between core and wis.dm.
Conditions
The company seems to be on a quest of finding the right format of what it is and how it works. Since core had consulted wis.dm in autumn 2006, the website has had three facelifts, changing the logo and the brand look in colors and experience, and the idea behind the project has also gained maturity. It was first a community of people giving comments and rating news they had found online. Now it is about asking questions and starting discussions about anything
This is not unusual for Web startups. Part of the Web 2.0-experience to the outside and inside is to look at the company as a changing and growing, living organism. The only drawback of that is the lack of consistency in brand experience. While you add new features and dismiss concepts that didn’t work out, your new visitors will embrace these things, while your existing user base will have trouble getting used to the changes.
Changing colors, a logo, icons, graphical language or the placement of navigational elements may be less disturbing than we would think, but they do have an influence on the overall feeling for the brand.
Solution
The following list includes consulting results and materials core has developed for wis.dm:
- A user-centric design concept, joining identity design and brand experience with the user experience
- Creation of design patterns: cleaning up existing design elements, giving each element a purpose, improvement of usability and the user experience
- A result of a consistent language of design elements, fonts and colors
- A whole range of icons for directive- and action elements, using consistent icon language
- A new homepage template
- An invitation graphics for the homepage
- A HTML-based, standards compliant email template
- An improved logotype based on the original logo
All work core developed in collaboration with wis.dm was based on the situation of September 2006. Meanwhile these conditions have changed a lot. Wis.dm has not only changed its website and user experience, they also changed their very definition of the product. The current line of wis.dm is “Question everything”.
Of course it would have been nice to see some of the actual design work of core being used, but overall it was a great experience to work for wis.dm. Their approach as a Web 2.0 company and their open mind towards simple, clear design solutions match with what core stands for. A lot of the thinking behind those solutions went into wis.dm and can be experienced on the community site today.
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