Case Study: iVillage

Staying Relevant and Anticipating Shifts in Screen Resolution
iVillage, the "Internet For Women" - a leading women's media company and the number one women's community online - approached Catalyst in anticipation of its 2005 website re-design. This Top 30 website, with over 17 million visitors per month, was planning a complete overhaul of its multiple content channels, media properties and community interfaces. While needing to achieve a more user-friendly architecture, and to maximize advertising sales, it also required a more efficient site- and content-maintenance capability. One major challenge: how to accommodate visitors to the site who view the web at 1024x768, vs. those who do so at 800x600 - without either wasting advertising space on one hand, or providing a compromised experience on the other.

Services Provided

User Interface Design, Audience Profiling, Persona Development, Interaction Strategy, Information Architecture

Methodology/Solution
Catalyst probed iVillage's business model, metrics and target audiences extensively, resulting in detailed user profiles that explored how and why visitors came to site. Given the large number of proprietary content channels as well as a wide variety of media properties (including several of The Hearst Corporation's magazine websites, e.g., Cosmopolitan.com, Redbook.com) under the iVillage umbrella, it was critical to systematize and clarify what audiences were doing and what they expected prior to any visual re-design. Catalyst's audience scenarios bridged the gap between demographics and business objectives, resulting in an information architecture and UI schematics that enhanced navigation and which also provided the company a new interactive tool: an area Catalyst dubbed "the Fourth Column." People who view the Web at resolutions of 1024x768 or higher have extra "real estate" on the screen compared to those who see the Internet at 800x600. This additional space had been an under-utilized asset for iVillage until Catalyst partnered with the company to devise a solution that permitted a variety of different content (such as promotions and advertisements) to be served in the Fourth Column for those that choose to view it (see fourth slide above).

Benefits
The recent re-launch of the site is still proving the concept, but heuristic evaluation and ad sales executives agree that the flexibility of the Fourth Column , combined with the improved navigation, provided a critical foundation for the subsequent visual refresh of the site. With the Fourth Column, iVillage can not only manage additional advertising inventory, but it can also provide a version of premium content - i.e., information not required by the core 800x600 experience, but which visitors might nevertheless find valuable.

Testimonial
"Catalyst worked closely with our team on defining a scalable structure for the design of the new iVillage site. They were instrumental in developing innovative concepts and architecture that worked with how our visitors interact with the new iVillage product. This was particularly true when it came to architecting the flow of traffic between the main content areas and the subsequent topics within each." - Paul Schrynemakers, Creative Director, iVillage Inc.

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