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WebTV Shopping

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Assignment: Create a robust Shopping area on the WebTV service that offered premium partnerships and rotating commerce vendors and used the common template developed for use across the service.

Approach: The shopping area of the WebTV service is extremely robust and offered members top level areas with key partners to bring the best shopping experience online to the WebTV space. In some cases the category was exclusive and in others there was a featured partner with other sites listed that could rotate at a later date. The intention was to bring more content from the partner site into the WebTV experience before handing off to the partner site.

The home screen had two featured items that could be sold plus the top 20 categories for ecommerce. Travel featured the partner MSN Expedia. Other Travel sites are also listed to add value to the end user. Electronics was a good example of a category that would rotate featured stores. Books is an example of an exclusive partner.

The common UI for the Shopping area used the service template - consistent masthead and footer - and featured robust content or utility above the fold in the top section of the screen, followed by rotating partner content and then partner or subcategory links. This pattern was used for all pages within the section regardless of whether there was an exclusive partner or not. In the case of the exclusive partner, links and content were pulled in from feeds rather than from other vendors.

The system developed was flexible that if a new partner was found, they could be swapped in at various levels of integration very easily.

Outcome: The Shopping Area was one of several areas completely redesigned for the new service launch in 1999. The launch itself was very successful.