1. The Brief
Samsung wanted to promote their new product, the new 360 Wireless Audio speaker. We had to design a section of the Samsung TV/AV website‘s front webpage in order to convey the benefit of the new Samsung speaker.
2. Our proposition
We initially were asked to work on a stand-alone landing page that would tell visitors about the product. But, through our research, we discovered users do not click-on articles unless they know or understand the product. This was a brand new line of product from Samsung. Nevertheless, there was already a lot of skepticism in the technology market when it came to this product.
3. Personas and research
We interviewed a lot of consumers at retail stores during our research. Although, it was the younger audience within the 18-30 year demographic that we aimed for. We interviewed with question regarding what they, as consumers, wanted from an audio speaker. Another factor they wanted was in ‘brand awareness from Samsung’ as a audio brand.
Our surveys found the following results:
- The current wireless home speakers were dominated by these audio brands: Sonos, Sony, Bose, Beats and Ultimate Ears.
- Apart from having a few Bluetooth speakers on the market, Samsung is not known for audio products.
4. Sketches
Initially, we did our own landing page to get an idea on what type of content the website needed to communicate to the user. We looked at various website elements of the design. This included a ‘sliding element panel’ on the site’s frontpage. The user could then quickly scroll across to find out product details such as the information and specifications. It was based on information about the Samsung products and the attempt to keep the browser on that particular frontpage. We worked with the Samsung product managers regarding the features of the individual product. We utilised, both the persona research data and the input from the Samsung product managers. We wanted to see what they all wanted out of a wireless speaker, eventually, and what they wanted as a result from using them.
5. Prototyping
Samsung, also, asked us to create a basic prototype which included 6-slides in the initial testing. The prototypes were created in Sketch. We incorporated the existing site to our prototypes during our testing, we discovered users felt it was too much information while simultaneously being too congested for them as well. Therefore working with our editorial team and the Samsung product managers, we simplified the messaging to 4 slides. In addition, we reduced the copy by 40% without taking away from the content’s main message.
6. Final stage
Working with the Gadget Group technical team, we created a beta of the slider for the purpose of testing the functionality and the usability of the panel on a test page. We tested it again and found we created the ideal place where users could learn the benefits of the Samsung 360 Wireless Speaker. Equally important, when we got approval from the Samsung HQ, we deployed the new section of the website to coincide with the product launch on the frontpage of Samsung’s TV/AV website.
