Client Objective:

AltaVista has been widely recognized as the leading Internet search engine in terms of speed and number of pages indexed. Although AltaVista has strong name recognition and loyalty among technically savvy users, Digital Corporation (since bought by Compaq) sought ways to make the site more popular among the growing number of new Internet users. To attract a larger audience, and get them to come back again and again, AltaVista began to explore new services and different types of content, including multilingual search capabilities, translation services, and news feeds. AltaVista hired vivid to provide them with information design and visual design solutions that would enable them to incorporate new features without diminishing the overall user experience or service performance.

The main goals of the AltaVista redesign project were to help AltaVista integrate new, serious search features into the existing interface; to continue to serve the loyal user base while increasing the audience; to provide content and personalized information that helps customers make targeted, concise information searches; to increase advertiser and sponsor relationships and spending; and to build a stronger brand and clearly communicate that brand to content and technology partners.

vivid Implementation:

At the early stages of the project the vivid team held collaborative work sessions with their counterparts from AltaVista. In these sessions the teams analyzed AltaVista's existing brand by reviewing user needs and brand expectations and judged how closely AltaVista was meeting those needs. Following the brand analysis, vivid recommended refinements to the brand to enable it to appeal to a wider audience, and developed a brand strategy in keeping with AltaVista's sponsorship and partnering initiatives.
During the design/production phases of the project, vivid's brand identity and visual design personnel worked on cleaning up AltaVista's logo and familiar mountain peak graphic and evolving AltaVista's identity and advertising guidelines. vivid's information and interaction designers created a more streamlined and intuitive interface for the search engine and its results pages. The visual designs and newly enhanced user interface were created with an eye toward massive content and functionality expansion on the AltaVista site. vivid provided ample documentation to enable AltaVista to add new features and content rapidly and in a seamless manner.

The AltaVista site continues to grow and evolve. While an ever-expanding audience of Internet users comes to rely on AltaVista for information search and retrieval, translation services, and perspective on the rest of the Web, the search engine intends to remain true to its roots in technology.