Herman Miller enters the world of eSports
Project Goal
Introduce Herman Miller as a company and brand with insights, capabilities, and products that naturally align to today’s gamer to facilitate establishment of Herman Miller as a brand associated with excellence, performance, and gamer empathy.
My Role
Lead designer through end to end process: discovery, user research, requirements, design, testing, global support through launch
Team
Emily Carbonell-Ferguson, User Experience Strategist
Ryan Seguin, Art Director
Amanda Koellner, Brand Content Editor
Eric Ishii-Eckhardt, Senior Manager
Research & Insight
Because this was a new market, we needed to hear directly from our target audience to understand their current perceptions and gauge effectiveness of our messages, visual language, user experience, and brand expression.
To do this, we held a series of both moderated and unmoderated interviews where we gained insight to validate whether we were on the right track, inform future rounds of testing, and ultimately, implementation.
The architecture of this new digital experience presented several potential usability issues. In order to mitigate these issues, we identified each touchpoint from all of our digital properties that a user would interact with through out the journey.
We created a flow diagram to identify each entry point that a user could take to get to this new experience. Through this we were able to identify rules that each our digital properties needed to adhere to in order to create a seamless experience that users could easily navigate to and didn’t disrupt our non-gaming users.
Strategy & Concepts
After we identified the user’s goals and motivations we moved into wireframing, in which we determined the order of content elements that are flexible enough to support various types of content on each particular page. It was important that the content on the page educated customers and potential customers on the product benefits as well as on the technical and design considerations built specifically for them.
We identified the goals and key tasks that align to completing sales, generating awareness, and facilitating customer delight across all customer types.
Design Execution & Guidelines
The design needed to maintain Herman Miller’s aesthetic while entering a new play on gaming. It was important that the digital experience felt aligned to the overall gaming aesthetic. A gaming styleguide was created in order to ensure a consistent and seamless experience across multiple touch points.
Pages were built using a modular design system based on reusable components. Every component can be rearranged and combined to allow flexibility to support the content that our customers need to get the information and experience that leads to a successful purchase.
Styleguide
Homepage
Product Listing Page, Product Detail Page
Product Detail Page
Site Guidelines
A site guidelines and directions document was created and distributed out to various team as a guide for producing content for Herman Miller Gaming. This document includes page structure and flow, video and photography standards, character counts, etc. This ensures smooth content production and a seamless storytelling experience across the site.
Results
11 global websites on 2 platforms
Largest product launch in Herman Miller retail history
Highest performing day in Herman Miller retail