Pocitacovka's old website turned five and needed a new look that is fresh, fun and memorable. Exactly the kind of job for us.
UX with a pinch of comedy
Pocitacovka asked us to present them as a fresh and modern company operated by young people who are not boring and get the stuff done. They also needed something that will help them stands out in the crowd of IT businesses.
First we looked at the structure of the old website and some analytics data which helped us to come up with structural changes and ideas for simplification. We wanted the whole thing to be as simple as posible with just enough information. We teamed up with copywriter Šárka Petruželová who helped us handle the copy for the website.
From the begining we knew we wanted to use some fun IT related characters as a main visual comical feature of the new website. Client loved the idea so we felt confident to proceed and put some ideas on the paper first. Then we put everything in Marvel and created an interactive prototype of the new UX design. After some testing and consultations with the client we were ready to create the final design and code it.
Contact form
We wanted to put a nice surprise at the end as a reward for those who submit the contact form. So after designing the initial "boring" version of the contact form we decided we need to increase the comedy level and went back to drawing board. Inspired by the ending of Dr. Strangelove we came up with a much better way to handle the form submission.
Keeping it stylish
Lucky for us, our client was just like us. Against conservative approach, looking for something new.
When we researched Pocitacovka's competitors nobody really stood out and frankly now we don't even remember what brands we looked at. This website needed to be very different so e spent quite a bit of time figuring out the best visual and technical approach for this project. After sketching out a lot of ideas and thinking about their technical implementation we settled for the idea of making short animated videos with characters that represent each area of Pocitacovka's areas of services. Client was very happy with the idea and gave us a green light. We ended up making four primary character types which we modeled in 3D, rigged and animated and rendered.
Browser, leave my colors alone!
The process of coding didn't bring many technical challenges except for having to battle the browser video color corretion so we could match the video backgrounds to the background of the website for seamless look. The website didn't require any super advanced back-end engine so went with good ol' Wordpress.
Working on a new website for Pocitacovka was a lot of fun. In the end we were happy to make something that not only put a smile on our client's face but also increased the traffic and conversion rates and is generally more user friendly website than its predescessor.
