Abstract

Interpret ng the Female User
standing of the BEME.com technological environment and the type of experience
BEME.com offered to its online female users.
Launch
The final stage of design and production was the launch. With the site live and
running, IPC took over the content production and site maintenance, as originally
agreed with the contracted agencies. However, information about the success of the
site was not always passed on to the people who designed it, as the female senior
producer commented:
[Once the site was launched] … IPC became very protective about it. They didn’t
want to give us, like the people who’ve been involved … you give up sort of 6
months of your life to working on something ... no kind of feedback on statistics …
How many people go in there. They kept it all very closed to their chest, which is
their total right ‘cause they were the buyer and they were paying us. (I-PT5, 2001,
ll. 144-149)
As is often the case in design practice, once the requested outcome is considered
finalised, the client takes over, with no intrinsic need to give feedback to the agency.
However, in the case of Internet technologies, designers place enormous value on
learning from previous experiences. By withholding such information, IPC was
not seen favourably by the design agencies, as was manifest in the interviews.
The design team was considered in an inferior position because they were merely
creators rather than owners.
Performance.Review.and.Redesign
It is unfortunate that when BEME.com arrived on the scene, the dot.com boom was
starting to deflate, as one of the pioneering Internet investors in the UK observed,
“… it was late to the market first of all … it was not a first mover and I think that
that was a disadvantage” (I-IP2, 2002, ll. 122-124). By February 2001, there were
already warning signs of a possible closure. It was becoming obvious to IPC that
a broad, editorially driven portal was not necessarily the best way to attract female
customers (D-PREA2k, 2001). At this point, BEME.com implemented a change
in strategy and a redesign, strengthening the connection between the portal and
traditional women’s paper magazines. From an online portal that prompted high
quality of design, visually, BEME.com became just another site amongst many.
The clean and spacey design was replaced by a generally available and often used
Copyright © 2007, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission
of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited.