Whilst working at Razorfish London I was the lead designer/art director on the BlackBerry account for 18 months. It was 2011, when BlackBerry still had a strong place in the smartphone market. It was an incredibly busy period, we started with one project and a small team and grew rapidly to become one of Razorfish London's highest performing accounts.
BlackBerry Tablet Experience
BlackBerry asked us to create a tablet optimised experience to sit as a layer above the vast content of their desktop site. We were asked to engage users with new products, latest features and build the BlackBerry community. In an art director's role, I worked with a designer and flash developer to present BlackBerry with the idea of a flexible grid with different modules which could be adapted each month depending on their marketing/business focus. We also built a motion piece to help the client get a clearer understanding of the type of experience they could achieve.
BlackBerry Product launches
Whilst working for BlackBerry I was responsible for all new product launches. We would work on campaigns for the homepage and then design the product feature pages below. We set up fully editable templates with linked smart-objects to make it easy to update all the OS screens across EMEA markets.
BlackBerry Social Feed
This a concept for surfacing social media content around a BlackBerry product launch or OS update. The BlackBerry brief asked that we didn’t interfere with site structure and or create any new pages that would need to be maintained. This left us believing it would need to sit as a layer above the site that could be easily populated and turned on/off when needed. We initially explored the idea of it having a content piece in a lightbox, but it felt like it needed creative editorial work to make it look good and it felt disjointed from the product we were trying to celebrate below. The best solution was for it to behave as a drawer and to take on the same appearance of the feeds we were pulling in.
Smartphone landing page & improved Sales Funnel
A larger UI/UX piece I was involved in was the re-designing BlackBerry's smartphone sales funnel. The site currently had flyout navigation that linked you into each model directly. The recent launch of the PlayBook had expanded the site structure. We advised BlackBerry to amended the navigation to combine the Smartphones and PlayBook under the new title of, 'Devices'. We explored different options for the flyout under this navigation model.