When Pearl Solutions came to us to make a customer site, our design team of four came together with an idea: Create two themes based on the demographics of the primary users of Pearl Solutions software and two of us will design for each of them. From there, Pearl would be able to choose which version they would prefer. I was assigned the theme of creating one of the themes along with my design colleague, Bryce Thorson. I was also assigned to the creation of the PowerPoint presentation. The plot twist was: We had a 4 days before we needed to present. So we got some coffee and went straight to work!
Looking at the primary users of the Pearl Solutions, we created personas to summarize their needs and skill sets. We made very strict decision-making processes (we played rock-paper-scissors) to decide who would design for which user. As the winner, I chose James.
Each designer needed to show the some design inspirations. Laying out some of the stand-out features are a great way of communicating what features in the website designs that make it special. I thought about what someone like "James" would enjoy in a website. Seeing that this persona isn't tech savvy, I wanted to make a customer site that adheres to simplicity. Instead of making a site that is flashy and filled with extreme animation and over the top imagery, I wanted to create a site that anyone could see and understand the point of. When searching for inspiration, I looked at sites that weren't filled with flashiness. The commonality for each of the inspiration boards that I did find was that the features are emphasized as the main purpose of the site. Adding a lot of white space gives the user "breathing room" so they can fully ingest the features without distraction.
I took what were considered stand-out features and incorporated them into my design idea. One of the most important features that I added was the ability to read more information about each feature. I found inspiration in the Pearl Solutions logo as well and added a similar shape to the imagery to relate this customer site back Pearl. The simplicity of the design will allow users to focus on the features that are being offered. The icon displaying "Why Dealerships Need This Product" gives user a really quick look into what the product does and the rewards of using it. Designing a more subtle interface was not the easiest for me. I normally enjoy sites that have a lot of interesting interactions and colors so I had to think about the importance of simplifying my ideas and designing an MVP-like website. Instead of adding a lot of vibrant colors or gradients, I instead looked into how I could add subtle beauty to seemingly sterile content.
After each of us presenting our work to the client, Pearl decided to go with.... Neither! They instead created their own customer site! Although neither of our designs were chosen, this project was a great way to churn out a design idea with a little fun competition. I had a lot of fun working with my colleague and was able to gain a valuable lesson about designing a customer site that is strictly feature based. I also learned that enough coffee can get you to finish a project in 4 days!
