Role
Senior Designer

Agency
AKQA

After two successful years of partnership, Rolls-Royce asked AKQA to refresh their .com platform, to reinvigorate it with a more compelling and performing experience.

AKQA acquired the account in 2015, creating an elegant, touch-responsive gateway that illustrates the luxury lifestyle that the double-R emblem has come to represent. Subsequently, the AKQA team was asked to conceive a second release of the .com platform to redesign the whole digital experience and improve performance.

I worked closely with the RR Team to do this: I contributed to conceiving, crafting and prototyping the new experience, focusing on interaction design.

Prototyping the experience.

A big goal for the team was to present the new vision for the platform with a fully working prototype, to let the client live the experience in first person.

After a first phase of research and study, we built a simple prototype in a couple of weeks of hard work. This included working on visual design, information architecture, user experience, rapid testing, motion design and building the prototype.

The design process.

With a small and agile team made up of me and another designer, we built a pipeline that would involve Flinto as a key step into the design process. From the early stages of the design we used the prototype to test behaviours, interactions, animations, then moving back to Sketch to adjust the layout, test it again until the final decisions.

We wanted to have a fully working prototype with all the details included. We wanted micro-animations to help the user get support in understanding the hierarchy and create focus. We used both Flinto and After Effects to produce the animations and give the client a sense of the final piece.

Results

The client really appreciated our new vision for their platform and decided to proceed with the development.