Secret Agency Man- UX, League of Legends, and Custom Furniture.
with Nick Franchi
Super Top Secret- Salt Lake city-
I recently led a meetup with the interactive creative director at Super Top Secret Nick Franchi, one of the lead digital marketing agencies in Salt Lake City. I asked him to come in and talk a bit about user experience design and how it fits in with agency work.
Super Top Secret in salt lake city is known for making stunningly beutiful digital experiences, tailor-made to a specific brand or campaign. But we invited him to come talk to us about how it all works. He brought in some slides and talked about a couple projects they worked on and who the users were for each.
League of Legends — gamers play games
Super Top Secret has been working on League of Legend’s immersive informative website aptly named “Universe”. Universe was created for the millions of player of LoL that wanted more info on their heroes. A couple of the challenges of this project were; They were likely viewing the site on their desktop since they were gamers, the game is a world wide phenomenon, so they had to deal with Language limitations.
Because they are an agency they are hired by other companies to build these beautiful products, though that doesn’t mean nothing can go wrong. Nick told us that after launch Riot games had some feedback about not quite being able to read some information on the heroes and their backgrounds. Their solution to this was to have a sort of night an day toggle in the corner.
It seems to me that since agencies are more visually based and they have much tighter deadlines they may not have the luxury of doing in depth user-testing that may find some of those issues early on. On the other hand, maybe they can get away with it working with big names Nike, EA, and Riot games.
Project Sunday- Elegant Custom Furniture
What STS did for Project Sunday is nothing short of elegant. The goal for them was not to create an online market but to emulate what it feels like to enter a custom furniture workshop, you can almost smell the rich mahogany.
The experience of Project Sunday is very modern and almost experimental. To accompany this experience STS also created physical brochures to accompany the site for older users or people not used to navigating a site as beautiful as this.
The Takeaway
UX design is a growing field and you can use it’s processes to make pretty much anything work better for the people that use them. STS May have a different process of designing for users than a start-up or a fortune 500, But it clearly works. If you want to see more of what STS or Nick Franchi are up check out their work on Dribbble.com https://dribbble.com/supertopsecret.