Design To Wake a Sleeping Giant
Before and after: Verywell (right) replaced the venerable About Health network, injecting new life into About.com as part of its new vertical strategy.
The Team
Josh Clark: Creative direction, UX design
Dan Mall: Art direction
Brad Frost: Front-end design and development
Ian Frost: Front-end design and development
After 20 years on the web, About.com was showing its age. Big Medium helped the company reinvent its product strategy and design process���and created some mighty good-looking and profitable sites along the way.
At the start of 2016, About.com was still the 40th-largest site on the web in page views, but the network was seeing punishing drops in page views. The network���s massive collection of general-interest content, once its greatest asset, was now seen by search engines as a content farm. Its design was generic and conservative, and the pages were choked with ads and pay-per-click links in a desperate attempt to keep revenue level. Audience and advertisers were turning elsewhere.
Big Medium worked with About.com to develop a new vertical strategy, carving out the content from the main network into branded premium experiences. Big Medium designed the health vertical Verywell and the finance vertical The Balance, giving both a warm, humane feel that was missing from About.com. The results were beyond expectations:
The new verticals have more than doubled engagement in every metric.
With far fewer ads, ad visibility and engagement are way up, along with ad revenue.
About.com���s verticals Verywell, The Balance, and Lifewire are all in Comscore���s top ten in their categories .
Along the way, Big Medium also overhauled the company���s entire approach to web development. Josh Clark, Brad Frost, and Dan Mall embedded with the Verywell team���s leadership and introduced:
A newly collaborative design process
���Designing and deciding��� in the browser
The atomic design methodology
A tight focus on the mobile experience
See the sites in action: www.verywell.com and www.thebalance.com
Verywell���s design is a welcome departure from the hyper-clinical approach of other health sites. The stock-photo-heavy sector gets a reprieve with hand-drawn, humanizing illustrations.
We designed every page starting with mobile, reflecting the reality that smartphones are the preferred experience for most visitors.
