CentralPark Sydney
Situation:
2013 – I was asked to help BMF Advertising on a tight deadline to complete the UX for the Central Park property development, a billion dollar 5.8-hectare mixed-use development on Broadway in central Sydney.
Strategy, technology and IA were all being finalised simultaneously.
Tasks:
Understanding the scope and objective of the project.
Verifying that all the same content is carried through to the new IA.
Creating a new IA and user Journey paradigm.
Working on Personas and key user paths within the team.
Creating wireframe architecture for the site.
Action:
IA Restructure
The first challenge was re-orienting IA towards a customer centric structure, and consolidating the user journeys into experiential, emotive journeys supported with technical background and resources.
This required significant cross referencing and reorganising as we had instructions that all content had to be included in the new vision.
I suggested the inclusion of an investor’s centric experience, and reinforced the importance of the emotive nature of property sales to be supported by the facts.
Interaction Design
The wireframes passed through a 6 versions as requirements and design concepts evolved concurrently in a high pressure, long day environment. They finished with 3 key templates for the site with 9 options overall.
It included Responsive Design, built on a 4-2-1 column breakdown from web to tablet then mobile.
The key function in the templates for this very visual website was a series of standard content ’tiles’, configured by the CMS, that could be dropped into most of the key templates. They could be configured in 1,2,3 or 4 unit elements, grouping and resizing accordingly.
Benefits:
Each tile has the same structure: a feature graphic, a background graphic, text and CSS box styling. It provides consistent configuration and scalable applications.
Some elements ‘hidden’ depending on 4,3,2, or 1 tile configuration, but a standard ‘record’ for each tile.
Keying on the tile element allowed for an auto generating index system, based on the tiles chosen.
This structure allowed for straight-forward responsive design that performed on monitor, tablet and mobile by adjusting modules from rows to columns as required.
This graphic flexibility allowed for simple in-house CMS, with flexible configuration. Start using default settings and evolve all the way through to 3rd party specialist design of graphic assets – all within the same CMS and while maintaining live text for SEO purposes.
Property Finder Experience
I designed a mobile friendly, simplified property finder and filter
The results had to reflect ‘Typical’ results, and allowed for actual properties, but was more about informing users on the profiles of the different buildings, their price range and offerings and the properties available.
if you chose a size, the price range variables at each end of the scale would update to reflect the price range of the size chosen. Thus, each size choice would redefine the price scale.
if you chose a price range, the size options would ‘gray out’ if they were out of the price range.
The default was set at the full price for the penthouse, giving a full sort option to begin with.