Launch of Everbetter.ca

Last Fall, I had the chance of working with a team of extremely talented creatives at Sid Lee on designing a content Website for Baby-Boomers. Interesting project, target audience and objectives, I couldn’t wait to see the site go up.

Last week, the Website went up. Now, if you’ve ever worked on a Website, you’ll know that launches are a bit funny. It’s easy to focus on the details, bugs and last minute fixes and miss the most important question: Does it work?

The process

Sid Lee is different from other agencies. They’re very keen on nurturing and managing creativity. Projects start with a simple marketing brief, multi-disciplinary teams get together and start testing countless alternatives in an extremely non-linear fashion.

I personally had to do a lot of research on surfing and participation behaviors for the more active baby-boomers (our target audience), evaluate several social media approaches, do studies looking for ways to increase participation and perform card-sorting exercices to define the proper categorization of content. We went through several iterations, approaches and strategies to create the current Website.

Homepage

Article page

Profile page (Upon logging in)

The verdict

Could it have been better? Definitely, everything can be better. Some issues with the product could have been avoided by:

• Using the fold more effectively and avoiding pushing the core content below
• Clarifying the distinction between content tones and content categories
• Creating more interrelations between the various sections, tools and social elements
• Providing more content personalization tools to the user

But, overall, does it work? Does it address the need of providing a centralized source of relevant content to active Baby-Boomers in a refreshing manner? Although I think so, I’m not part of the target audience. Ever Better is very different from its competitors, it has a strong visual identity, it is clear and functionally sound, content is relevant and easy to find and all the social media tools you’d come to expect are available.

But, the real test for any product comes from hitting the market. We’ll have to wait and see if Ever Better satisfies a need and engages its target users.

Suggested Reading:

• Introducing the new Design
• Rethinking the Comment Form