Problem: In the spring of 2009, the Corbis development team in Seattle was upgrading their web platform and needed a redesign of it’s home page and editorial templates. The redesign needed to be completed within 6 weeks. All work was done from the Calgary Veer office.
Challenges: The Seattle development team had already done user studies to establish a new navigation, UI elements and search process. The design team was brought in afterwards and asked to create new templates that needed to adhere to the existing design decisions from a search persepctive and not a marketing perspective. We needed to find a balance that gave the marketing teams a platform to showcase product while the development team needed a platform that made searching as easy as possible. Plus the two teams never met face to face and would need to work together in a short time line.
Solution: A new home page template was created that put more emphasis on showcasing Corbis’s amazing photography with a larger, single story with a multi-story player was allowing the marketing team to promote 3 stories every month. I worked with the development team on establishing stylesheets that looks harmonious with their new search engine while introducing a new editorial grid for all static pages to meet the marketing teams needs (product pages, photo libraries, offer, etc.). Once these templates were approved by the various business units, the Seattle team began production, putting all work to a staged environment so that the Calgary office could see the end results. The new site was launched in June 2009.
