If it helps, the phrase we coined (or stole, I can't remember) to help sell a massive portal redesign @ my last employer was: Behavioral consistency and Contextual variety.
That is, during our redesign, we improved the consistency of all common behaviors throughout the site: links, menus, buttons, headlines, body text, transitions, dialogs, alerts, confirmations, ajax, etc. Yet at the same time we gave the business groups an entire library of new themes, images, colors and layouts to choose from, in presenting their various business needs. Previously, every page was forced into one common blue theme, and 99% of our pages followed the same 2 or 3 column layout. We relaxed a lot of our standards for the 80% of our content that reached only 20% of our employees, except for the key behavioral standards described above. The result was a much more engaging and interactive portal, with greater predictability by its users, and greater creative freedom by its contributors. We drove the above changes following interviews and surveys with about 1000 employees (both visitors and contributors to the portal), incidentally. Of course, I left a year ago, so everything could have changed by now =] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=34308 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
