These case studies focus on the websites AOL, MSN and Yahoo. They heavily reference the evolution of web design to evaluate current design trends, and as such, the primary visual reference shown in each case study is an animation illustrating five major redesigns from each of the chosen websites over the past two decades. These animations can be directly compared and provide an accurate representation of each given snapshot.
The case studies
Why choose AOL, MSN and Yahoo?
As stated above, I needed sites with a certain amount of history to have enough samples to study, but in my initial research and data collection, many older websites were developed too specifically for certain browsers at one point or another. Due to these “optimizations,” many web pages cannot be rendered consistently using modern HTML and CSS engines. Websites with larger and more varied audiences did a better job of adhering to progressive enhancement as a standard, though, so sites like AOL, MSN and Yahoo resulted in much more reliable samples than, say, Adobe, which used Flash for its primary (and occasionally sole) content delivery system throughout the majority of its archives.
As far as creating a series of case studies goes, I found there were two discerning paths I could explore. The first was to sample websites of a specific genre and evaluate their evolutions. The other path was to take a larger sample of websites and compare their structures from a significantly older generation of web design to their current ones. I chose to remain in the same vein as some of my previous research because it provided a better basis for competitor analysis and therefore trend discovery. AOL, MSN and Yahoo fit this requirement perfectly.
Finally, these three websites represent significant portions of their respective businesses. This means they have always been revenue driven and each iteration on design must be an honest attempt to bolster that metric. Accessibility, although a core driving component in web environments today, has always been at least a method of achieving better conversion rates and maintaining an existing user base, furthering the point of progress.