For McGraw-Hill, updating its Harrison's Online Web site offered the opportunity to do much more. Familiar with Dynamic Diagrams' information architecture, design, and development expertise, McGraw-Hill asked us to help create AccessMedicine, a Web portal that could encompass a large number of medical textbooks.

Harrison's Online had a large and positive user base. With AccessMedicine, McGraw-Hill wanted to ensure that these users remained satisfied. The new multi-publication site would take advantage of improved Web technologies, but it still needed a similar structure as the earlier online textbook.

The information architecture we had created for Harrison's Online was easily scalable. With some refinements, we established it as the structural model for all AccessMedicine publications. At the same time we took a fresh look at the navigational architecture of the publication pages, keeping the cross-links that users used most and creating additional navigational cues where appropriate.

The new designs for the AccessMedicine site took advantage of improvements in browser capabilities while reflecting changes in Web user expectations. Primarily text-based for fast display, the designs feature a clean, modular interface that can handle both short and very long content pages. Each publication on the portal uses a different color scheme, making them easy to differentiate.

Since the relaunch of Harrison's Online the architecture we created has successfully handled the addition of a number of publications and new features. The designs have been adjusted in response to a rebranding initiative, but the functionality of the site has remained the same.