In 2006, Lex­i­co Pub­lish­ing Group, cre­ators of Dictionary.com (the most-vis­it­ed online dic­tio­nary) and Thesaurus.com (the most-vis­it­ed online the­saurus), tapped us to redesign their pop­u­lar ref­er­ence network.

By com­ing first and being best, the net­work had earned a huge fol­low­ing. But after more than a decade online, Lex­i­cos brand iden­ti­ty and site struc­ture had begun to lose focu­sand the com­pa­ny was los­ing mar­ket share to younger competitors.

Problems of long-running successful sites

Lex­i­cos prob­lems were typ­i­cal of large, long-run­ning web con­tent prop­er­ties that have grown in an organ­ic (but also some­what hap­haz­ard) man­ner, year after fast-paced year.

Its adver­tis­ing accep­tance pol­i­cy had become loose and some­what vague. This in turn cre­at­ed incon­sis­tent col­umn widths from one page to the next, caus­ing vis­i­tors to won­der if they were still on the same net­work of sites. URL redi­rects did lit­tle to reas­sure new users that they had come to the place they intend­ed. Sub­tle, uncon­sid­ered dif­fer­ences between net­work logos fur­ther less­ened the sense of brand cohe­sion. Although it was doing many things right, Lex­i­co need­ed help.

First restructure, then redesign

We reor­ga­nized the mul­ti-site net­works URL struc­ture so that first-time users would feel safe and the con­nec­tion between sites would be clear. Ana­lyz­ing the mul­ti­ple sites numer­ous capa­bil­i­ties from the point of view of users, we were able to sur­face fea­tures that had always been present but were rarely used because nobody knew about them.

We brought a new lev­el of uni­for­mi­ty to adver­tis­ing and page lay­outs. To the extent that we could do so, we also brought hier­ar­chy and coher­ence to page typog­ra­phya crit­i­cal improve­ment, giv­en that Dictionary.com and its sib­lings are text-dri­ven appli­ca­tions. We fresh­ened and tight­ened the brand iden­ti­fiers, too, mak­ing site logos work bet­ter as a group, while chang­ing as lit­tle else as possible.

Next, we updat­ed the col­or scheme and deep­ened its log­ic to make the relat­ed sites feel more like a fam­i­ly, again keep­ing change to a bare min­i­mum. We then replaced the sites aging markup with clean seman­tic struc­tures styled via smart CSS.

The benefits of good design

After our redesign, Dictionary.com and its sis­ter sites deliv­ered a smoother, smarter, more con­sis­tent user expe­ri­ence. Cus­tomer feed­back­even from long-term users, who typ­i­cal­ly dis­like change­was over­whelm­ing­ly pos­i­tive. Shoring up the loy­al­ty of exist­ing users was the first step toward grow­ing mar­ket share. It also caught the atten­tion of investors and buyers.

Six months after we redesigned dictionary.com, the com­pa­ny sold for rough­ly three hun­dred times our feep­roof that design is not an expense, its an invest­ment.

Two years lat­er, the pur­chas­er redesigned the site again. The present Dictionary.com does not reflect our work, but you can vis­it the archival site to get a notion of what we cre­at­ed. (Mod­ern ele­ments of the site, designed sub­se­quent to our work, get pulled into the archival site, cre­at­ing an expe­ri­ence that is not what we designed, exact­ly, but is as close as one can come to it today.)

Our responsibilities on this project

Research; strat­e­gy; infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture; brand design and con­sult­ing; graph­ic design; user inter­face design; user expe­ri­ence design; CSS/HTML tem­plate devel­op­ment. The redesign launched 21 August 2006.