One of the great things about working on interactive development at a brand design firm like PBDH is the variety of projects and clients we get to work with.
It’s not uncommon for us to help one company collaborate with a business audience one day and then help another connect with a retail audience the next.
One interesting retail project we are diving deep into at the moment is the retail web site for The Shops at the Bravern, a European-inspired shopping and dining experience that’s set to open in downtown Bellevue later this year.
The Shops at The Bravern will feature outdoor plazas, great stores like Neiman Marcus, fine dining like New York-based Artisanal, as well as urban residential towers.
We are heavy into the design and strategy phase of the project and it is exciting to work with folks from Schnitzer West to as we consider all of the things that today’s web makes possible.
Will be joining my pals Kathy Gil, Scott Berkun, Brady Forrest, and Buzz Brugeman (among others) for Presentation Camp Seattle on Saturday April 4th 2009 at the University of Washington.
Here’s the schedule and the skinny –
PresentationCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of passionate folks who want to share, interact and spread the love around the topic of presentation design and delivery. It’s for anyone interested in public speaking, pitching and presenting. Come to learn, come to share: everyone walks away knowing a little bit more.
Sign up now over on the Eventbrite page for the event. It’s $15 until the day of, then it’s $20.
It’s an unconference which, if you’ve never been to one, is a blast. The main idea is that the best thing about most conferences are the hallway conversations, so why not make up a conference on the fly that has that feel to it.
So participants gather in the first hours of the conference and propose session ideas, then the popular ones are assigned slots. Looks from the schedule that this camp will have some good pre-planned sessions and some slots for real time session creation.
I’m proposing a session tentatively titled “Telling Ain’t Persuading (or teaching, selling, or training)!!: Case studies in conversational/Socratic presentation methods“.
It will be a discussion of presentation examples / methods that don’t just give an answer, but that invite people into dialogue / experience — and how that often has much more staying power that just passing along information.
Will be touching on:
- The structure of the attention economy unconference talk I’ve presented a few times — “Starbuck vs. Samwise in a Fight (and what does that have to do with the Attention Economy?)” — and how the form of the talk is an effective design for learning.
- How the unstructured and question driven nature of the classic video game Myst is arguably more involving (and compelling) that most present day games.
- How books like Ken Bain’s “What the Best College Teachers Do” and the American Society for Training and Development’s “Telling Ain’t Training” (by Harold Stolovitch) showcase proven ways to present more compellingly.
So, come join us!
About two years ago we decided we were long overdue for a new Web site. The old pbdh.com site, while still mostly functional, wasn’t quite the spring chicken it was when we launched it back in 2003. So we got together and started to figure out how we could improve the site as a whole. The look, the functionality, the usability and even the overall purpose of our site were considered. When all was said and done we came up with one major goal: simplify. In the words of Albert Einstein we decided that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
We started by looking at the many different sections and pages we had produced over the years. Some of them were from the original site-map, others were add-ons cobbled together over various marketing initiatives, and one or two pages just showed up one day out of the blue. As is the case with most aging Web sites it was becoming cluttered and difficult to navigate. It needed a major overhaul.
News
We started with our news content. We had eight different pages devoted to news-worthy information: News, Events, In The News, Newsletter, News Archives, Press Releases, and a blog called Open House. There were just too many places to start. So we simplified. Instead of eight different pages devoted to eight different types of news we decided to route all the news content through our blog. After all a (good) blog is, by definition, a reverse chronology of written information that can be timely, interesting, though-provoking, insightful, and informative. We decided that if our news isn’t any of those things it doesn’t need to be on our Web site in the first place. So now Open House is one page of news instead of eight pages of news. It’s simpler. It’s better.
Portfolio
Early portfolio information architecture sketch.
Next, we tackled our portfolio. As much as we design firms like to champion our processes, a portfolio is still probably the most important part of a Web site. We had a very comprehensive portfolio with plenty of examples of our work and it told a good story of what we were capable of as a firm. But, it had one major flaw: it was designed for us, not our users. The portfolio was was organized by our clients’ names, and as long as people wanted to simply browse the portfolio and see the work we had done for each client they were in good shape. This organization worked great for us too because we know our clients intimately and we could easily navigate to any one portfolio example without much trouble. But then we put ourselves in the shoes of a first-time visitor and started to imagine how they would want to navigate our work.
Let’s say there’s a guy named John Doe and he’s looking for a design firm that does fantastic annual reports. His boss wants him to round up some samples of annual report work from Seattle design firms by noon so he can start putting together a short list of people to call. With the old portfolio structure John would have to click through each client individually to see whether or not any annual reports had even been produced before he could start selecting the ones he liked. We figured John probably wouldn’t take the time do this extra work in the end. So we began architecting our portfolio around John’s goals and the goals of people like John. This was easy to do because the development of personas have long been a key step in our own experience design process—we just never had a chance to try personas out on ourselves! (And like we’ve been telling our clients all along: personas work.) In the end we came up with a portfolio that assembles itself on the fly depending on what the user is interested in. User interest can be as broad as work for print or as granular as annual reports and the portfolio will accommodate. And for those want to see it all at once there’s still a comprehensive client list option.
Change of Plans
Things were moving along nicely at this point. We came up with a pretty fun concept for our always popular people page and after a final tally of 3778 photographs, staff camera-shyness was at an all-time low. We were a week or so away from going live when the conversation turned to rebranding the entire firm. (I won’t go into the rebrand process as Devin did a good job explaining it in the previous post.) Since we built the entire site with extensibility in mind from the beginning, it was a fairly painless process to scrap the entire look and feel and redesign the site form the ground up in under three weeks. (When used properly CSS is a wonderful thing—more on that in a future post.)
Transparency
The final touch was to introduce our focus on transparency into the site visually, and the final solution might be my favorite part of the site. We are using photography, illustration and even strategy diagrams somewhat abstractly throughout the site. While each image is visually interesting as presented, it can also be extended to reveal a bit more information or even link to a relevant project. Moving forward we want to introduce a lot more of this “behind the scenes” imagery. We are also having some fun with it on the Open House page by giving visitors a peek into our work areas. Ultimately it’s a pretty subtle feature, but it offers a little something extra for people who are curious.
Both the rebrand of PBDH and the redesign of pbdh.com were very successful endeavors and we’re all pretty proud of the results. Next week in Part 2: How It All Works I’ll give you some insight into how the site works and how we manage content. And feel free to leave any comments or suggestions as we’d love to hear your feedback.
