A unique challenge, the creation of this took some imagination. As Orange doesn’t have an extensive offers system for the sales force to populate, there weren’t any offers with which to populate the design. Rather than using mis-leading lorem ipsum copy, I was forced to populate the designs with offers made up by yours truly. The sales team remarked that some of them were actually decent propositions. I told them I’m sure they could do better – and they will.
CDB Web Design
…and other tech stuff by Chris Baldock
The 2010 Christmas shop on T-Mobile was the most challenging design I’d ever undertaken at the time. We had an idea of combining all Christmas buying options into one page, giving customers the easiest possible way to choose and buy, and the quickest journey to the checkout.
I delivered the graphic design and wireframes for this project, and the page benefitted from a creative workshop early on in the process involving all of our small design team at the time. The idea of the living room was to try and match what T-Mobile’s retail stores were doing at the time, as they had cardboard fireplaces and picture frames with phones in them.
A project close to my heart as an Android phone user, the aim of this undertaking was to inform customers about what they can do with an Android phone. T-Mobile stock so many Android phones that this zone became a necessity that the User Experience department including myself had to push for. Our competitors at the time had similar but much less content-rich Android areas, and we spotted an opportunity.
A message for sales departments everywhere: listen to your technophile designers when selling electronics.
These pages were pretty frequently produced for different products each month. As time went on we were able to add more to these pages with improved imagery and more interactivity. The hot spots that appear over the products are hover objects and they change the state of the text next to the image. The hot spots are placed in positions relevant to the feature and as time went on we were able to add images to illustrate each feature too. These were simple but enjoyable pages to create as they give the products room to breathe.
This page was an all-singing, all dancing introduction to the Motorola ATRIX, a pretty special phone that plugged into a “lapdock” so you could use it as a laptop as well as a smartphone. I needed to capture both the excitement and refinement of the product and achieved it with various forms of rich media including advanced interactivity via an image selector module, feature flyouts and an integrated zoom tool.
The video containers in the main content each contained two short videos about each product option (just the phone, phone and HD dock or phone and lapdock). The specifications page while not exactly rich media is a pre-requisite on electronic product pages these days, and the Android tab was there to give a fun introduction to the operating system for those who have never used it.
A personal project of mine that is still a work in progress, Lets Talk Tall is intended to eventually be a hub for tall people like myself to share opinions and reviews about product and services they’ve used, or experiences they’ve had. People are getting taller but the world hasn’t caught up yet, so hopefully site and other like it can help to change that.
While this was fun creatively, after implementation I wondered whether I’d made the right decision with an illustrative style rather than a sensible, ecommerce style. It does show that we can’t always get it right, but that we shouldn’t be afraid to do something bright and fun.
If you want to see the live site: Lets Talk Tall