We have had a wonderfully engaging summer. Working for Sprint, Spiral16 and National Seminars we improved, expanded and created search and sort functions. The experience, paired with the invigorating Indian Summer weather, has our creativity humming.
First-up, Sprint who wanted to encourage self-service and reduce customer support on their ‘email us’ page. The page had a search box and contact form, plus 1/3 white space. So to emphasize their search engine (which is phenomenal compared to their competitors) and make the page more search dominated, FluidUI designed the following:
- First we changed the titles of the two sections with their response times.
The search section was titled “For Immediate Answers” and the email form was titled “For One Business Day Responses” - Next we branded the search to beget confidence.
- Then we took the 2 trigger modules titled “I need help with” and “I want to” from other areas of the site and customized their bullets to the top topics users of the form request information on, such as making a payment or questions on a phone plan.
We hit a home run with Sprial16’s social media monitoring software, for searching as well as scoring and indexing defines what they do best. FluidUI helped them determine the flow and look of their new self-service search function, by:
- Breaking the search function into a 4-step widget.
- Giving some of their terminology and icons more relevancy and a contemporary look.
- Designing 3 styles of page layouts to choose from.
Bringing it home was National Seminar’s detailed search on their Star12 training site. The site had advance search functions, which were spread across the center and left side of the page, plus falling below the fold. In addition, it did not have the desired tabs they wanted for sorting training into lists of training types (seminars, web, etc.). For them we:
- Reviewed their detailed branding and web guidelines.
- Reviewed how navigation treatment and tools were handled throughout their site and reviewed other well known search & sort sites.
- Then we went to work and 2 revisions later gave them a centrally located search and sort function with a simple search, advance search, and two rows of tabs.
During the summer we also assisted Sprint with a new ‘green’ promotional campaign using the emotional design tactics of PET and initiated adding e-commerce to their mobile site. All in all, a fun filled and productive summer indeed. As such, we’re looking forward to new grand slams and a few (only a few please) snowy days.