Norton & Com­pa­ny is the old­est and largest pub­lish­ing house owned whol­ly by its employ­ees. Nor­ton has pub­lished lit­er­ary clas­sics by authors rang­ing from Sig­mund Freud and Bertrand Rus­sell to Rita Dove and Stephen Jay Gould.

When the pub­lish­er approached us, the W. W. Nor­ton web­site was divid­ed into three siloscol­lege, trade, and pro­fes­sion­al­which made it dif­fi­cult for any sin­gle user to under­stand the breadth of Nor­tons offer­ings. Our new site would present Nor­ton as a sin­gle com­pa­ny with three depart­ments, while mak­ing it easy for each user to find the books she came for.

The new site had to com­mu­ni­cate that Nor­ton is a mod­ern com­pa­ny with an extra­or­di­nary his­to­ry of pub­lish­ing books not for a sin­gle sea­son, but for the years. It was impor­tant that the redesign posi­tion Nor­ton as web-savvy with­out dimin­ish­ing its her­itage and the author­i­ta­tive, clas­sic aspects of its brand attrib­ut­es. This is the kind of chal­lenge we love best.

First, do your homework

We began with an expert eval­u­a­tion of usabil­i­ty issues, detail­ing strengths and weak­ness­es of the com­pa­nys site, and iden­ti­fy­ing stake­hold­er pri­or­i­ties and audi­ence needs.

In our research, Nor­ton stake­hold­ers often likened pub­lish­ing hous­es to film stu­dios or record label­swhile its crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of a work, its large­ly invis­i­ble to the pub­lic. Except to an aca­d­e­m­ic audi­ence, Nor­ton was large­ly invis­i­ble and silent. We made a virtue of that anonymi­ty. If Nor­ton was for book lovers, the new site need­ed to get out of its own way while read­ers enjoyed clear path­ways to its books.

The big overhaul

Our top-down and bot­tom-up struc­tur­al redesign stopped forc­ing unnec­es­sary choic­es on users, and to rather looked for com­mon denom­i­na­tors across the silos. Stu­dents are not often pro­fes­sion­als; instruc­tors are not often stu­dents; and pro­fes­sion­als are often not involved with a col­lege. But all audi­ences are book read­ers, and all site users are book lovers (or poten­tial ones). We used that com­mon denom­i­na­tor to present an expe­ri­ence that worked for all audiences.

While tra­vers­ing the exist­ing Nor­ton site, con­sumers faced 17 dif­fer­ent nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems. That was 16 too many. We con­sol­i­dat­ed dis­parate nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems, bring­ing use­ful­ness and grace to an oth­er­wise mot­ley col­lec­tion of links and labels.

We cre­at­ed a con­sis­tent Book Detail tem­plate that is flex­i­ble enough to be used across all areas and uni­form enough to pro­vide a pre­dictable user expe­ri­ence. The way we saw it, the struc­ture of Nor­tons web­site should not be sur­pris­ingthe won­der­ful details of the book should be.

We clus­tered rich media around each book, and cre­at­ed struc­tures that made heroes of the books and their authors. Maybe its just us, but we fig­ured that when a web user googles a Nor­ton title or author, a Nor­ton web­site page should be among her top search results.

Make Search work harder for users and client

Speak­ing of Search, we fixed that, too. By default, we pro­vide a key­word search field, with a results page that defaults to the most rel­e­vant search results. We allowed users to search across trade, pro­fes­sion­al, col­lege, and sub-sites, such as ebooks. On search results, we allowed users to refine their search­es by allow­ing them to sort by title, author, and pub date, or allow­ing them to fil­ter by books with ancil­lary materials.

Fur­ther, we helped Nor­ton start using search pat­terns to inform the edi­to­r­i­al choic­es they make on the site. For instance, the books that Nor­ton choos­es to pro­mote on site Land­ing pages and the Home­page can be a result of pop­u­lar queries or swift changes in search patterns.

Vis­it the site.

Bringing it to Life

With every detail of the user expe­ri­ence in place, we set about cre­at­ing a design to com­mu­ni­cate Nor­tons rich her­itage while also feel­ing fresh and unex­pect­ed. The con­tent for each tem­plate type was care­ful­ly and strate­gi­cal­ly con­sid­ered. Every word count­ed. Every piece of copy had to com­mu­ni­cate the Nor­ton brand and help read­ers make informed choic­es (with­out over­whelm­ing them with choice).

Our responsibilities on this project

Usabil­i­ty audit; com­pet­i­tive audit; con­tent strat­e­gy; user expe­ri­ence design; infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; graph­ic design; user inter­face design, CSS/XHTML tem­plate devel­op­ment. Launched 1 June 2009.