The account for Isuzu.com was in review. The current vendor, Magnet, was determined to hold on to the business as it was financially in trouble. They did something desperate. The entire code base for the front end (essentially HTML) was printed out and handed to the client. “Do you see how complicated this is? No one can address the complexity of your site the way we can. You need us.” Wow! That was a novel approach.

Once my partner and I, William Bartley, helped them understand the basic mechanics of a website, we quickly gained their confidence and the account was ours.

I pushed the paradigm of where navigation “should” appear on a web page and developed the first, of many, right-hand navigation models. We read from left to right. Naturally, a user reads the page content and then decides where to go. The priority is on the content rather than the navigation. I also applied the basics of some reading I had done in Neuro-Linguistic Programming to inform the theory behind the proposal.

The automobile configurator used an accordion style navigation system that allowed a user to always move backwards and make changes to their selections. It created a more confident experience for users that our user-testing found was desirable. We launched isuzu.com in time for the 2003 model year.