US and Italy based creative agency Ideal comunicazione initiated a Hackathon to find a design concept for their new website, which could position the company as a creative hub.
I took part in the competition in a team with another designer. We developed a concept in which homepage of the agency’s website would feature design challenges for users and thus allow user generated content to build a creative hub. Our final idea won the first prize and was taken further into a design concept and finally implemented as the new website.
Project backgrounds and objectives
Ideal comunicazione is expanding to other countries and markets. In order to show its independence and identity, they thus held a twenty-four hour design competition to develop a distinctive interaction for a new official website.
Process
Ideation
Spark cool ideas
Pitch deck
Present our ideas in the pitch contest
Co-creation
Structure information, UX/UI templates for website implementation with clients
Ideation
Soon after being given the design brief, we started tackling the challenge of generating ideas about a groundbreaking digital hub. We devised and evaluated various interactive models associated to different kinds of audiences such as bloggers, professionals and video makers, intending to create a value environment which gathers creative input and talents to interplay with the client.
Our final solution, interestingly inspired by the meaning of Hackathon, was an Idea Generator — a creative challenge feature on the start page of the agency’s website, where users could create idea sketches through drawing, recording and writing. These sketches could be further used by the agency to reconnect with the users, picking talents when needed, as well as to actively involve idea sketches in actual projects as a service by Ideal.
Pitch deck
Within a very limited amount of time, we narrated our idea coupled with wireframes and handed this in as a 5 slide pitch deck. The panel certainly showed high interest in our Idea Generator, since the proposed model turned around the conventional model of a static site homepage towards a multiple-way interactive platform, with great business potential in establishing talent communities, public relations and so on.
Moreover, with regards with user experiences, the Idea Generator provides interesting, delighted experiences whilst mobile users can be easily engaged together with friends by Ideal’s weekly design challenges. The interaction is dead simple and quick, focused on doodle and photo sharing. No new interactions create obstacles to the user engagement.
Co-creation
After winning the first prize, we followed up the design process for around two months to continue the detail UX/UI design for later implementation and overall website refurbishment with the team including CEO, programmers, project managers, digital strategy teams, etc.
Use & information flow
My team partner was focused on strategically depicting the Idea Generator’s use flow, while I was analysing the information architecture of the agent’s existing site besides to our proposed one.
Wireframe & styleframe
In parallel to the use flow design, we established the backbone of the site’s layout, as well as worked on style guides. We found these visual creations were very helpful for the communication with the client who was not specialised on user experience. Based on the wireframes and styleframes, concerns of diverse communicative aspects from the team were drawn for the next iterative design.
Results and Impacts
Ideal comunicazione commissioned web developers to build the Idea Generator and published the revamped website with the new feature homepage after several months of implementation work. The homepage, as the first engagement touchpoint to the user, is now a clear representation of the agency’s dynamic and proactive attitude and their social network influence.
Further, there is now a clear process to engage and present the agency’s projects and services by following up the challenge questions with relevant work from the agency’s portfolio.
