Shortest Path to Knowing

When we design an identity or a website or a piece of literature, one of the questions we ask ourselves is, “Is this the shortest path to knowing?” When we were asked to design an interactive for an international corporation, that is exactly the question they needed answered. People in this division come from all over the world and they wanted them to get to ‘know’ each other and feel comfortable with each other quickly.

So, White Design Studio set out to design a solution that made participation in the program fun, and exploring the connections between people, intuitive and delightful. We began by designing special iPod Touch apps that interns could take around and photograph people, and enter some key data. We kept the questions telling, but fun and non-invasive.

“What kind of food do you like? Sushi? Pizza? Chicken and Waffles? We also left some of the questions open-ended so that we could have some content surprises within the interactive.

From there we designed an application that beckoned passers-by to interact, told a value story about the division, gave an opportunity to take a topical survey, and provided many entry points into the connections between the people in the division.

For 20 years, White Design Studio has integrated great building design, media design, print design and brand stories, into beautiful, meaningful customer experiences. Every new client gives us an opportunity to expand our capabilities, and refine our process. We love collaborating with architects, advertising firms and marketing departments, and we want to be a part of your team.

Watson’s is a locally-owned retailed of health, leisure, and lifestyle products for consumers’ own homes. They have been growing, and we were presented with an opportunity to help them launch a new kind of retail store. These stores will not hold the entire Watson’s catalogue on the showroom floor, but serve as smaller satellite stores featuring the most popular products. They are also geared to retaining current customers. For someone who bought a Watson’s pool, you will find the chemicals you need to maintain that pool located within easy reach of the front door and the cash wrap.

Watson’s wants to keep its customers coming back to a Watson’s store and make their products more accessible to a wider audience. White Design Studio designed the interior, the branding, and consulted on many aspects of this project to help ensure its success.

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Success is So Sweet

Ice Cream. Social. One of the best ways to capture the delight your customers are experiencing, is to get them to post it on their social network. Lots of the best yogurt chains have great campaigns for this. People like frozen yogurt. People like personalizing their own desserts. People like sharing their experiences.

It was the job of White Design Studio to create a delightful, delectable website, that acts as a great brand site, and encourages people to share their combinations and their delight. “Ice Cream. Social.” also appears in the store to remind patrons to tweet their joy and post a pic of their latest dish.

The website directs people to the store, of course, but it also gives people a taste of what they will find there, and whets their appetite for more.

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Windows of Opportunity

We wanted to tightly control the consumer perception of SelectView so that every touch point felt familiar to the last and built resonance with the buyer. White Design Studio worked with McCabe Lumber and SelectView to design 3 interactives that all serve different functions, but all feel like members of the same family.

The first is the website. When consumers hear an ad on the radio or see a brochure, we needed to have a great site that reinforces the story they just came in contact with, and lets them explore more.

Next, if you make an appointment, an agent will come out to your home and give you more information. We designed a sales presentation that runs on an iPad that allows that agent to step through the value of their products and services and tailor that story to the reactions of the homeowner. The salesperson needs a great-looking prop that makes the purchase feel like an inevitability to the consumer and answers even the toughest questions.

Lastly, the agent or another employee needs to document the condition, rough opening dimensions, finish dimensions, colors and finish selections, brand choices, construction types and flashing conditions. We designed an iPad app that lets someone collect all of this, take photos within the app, and keep the whole job in a relational database for the entire organization to leverage for client contacts, scheduling, ordering, staging, coordination and payment.

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Prints Charming

Spear is a global corporation that prints labels for a huge portion of the beverage and food packaging industry. Their innovations can be seen just about in every grocery store and convenience store in the world. Their tolerances for their own work are amazingly accurate, which made them challenging to impress.

White Design Studio worked directly with API to get things exactly right for Spear. When they hand their business card to Heineken or Starbucks, it needs to reflect the same exacting care that Spear lavishes on all of their clients.

The Spear print package is emotional, innovative, clean and exacting; all qualities reverent to the Spear brand. How does the world see you?

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Connecting with People

This is a division in P&G that is performing raw science, and taking innovations and observations from the development of a given product, and leveraging them to add value to their other products. It’s an exciting story to tell, but it is a complex story.

White Design Studio worked closely with BHDP and a group of core stakeholders at P&G to extract the story, sift through and find the value they provide to P&G and its consumers, and find ways to tell that story through exhibits, photography, text and signage.

The metaphor we all liked the best is that of a ‘weave.’ Often, their work requires examining an intersection and following those threads to discover how they interact with other things. So we designed exhibit threads that start at the entry of the space and reveal things throughout the environment as they intersect with other threads.

We tailored the content of those intersections to the varied audiences. Broader themes of value are toward the beginning of the experience. Then examinations of how the research is performed is in the middle of the experience. Finally, in the most private areas, individual discoveries are highlighted, and serve as technical examinations for the most technical audience, as well as a trophy case for recent innovations.

Sundae! Sundae! Sundae!

How do you make a store look, like a sundae tastes? How do you signal to your guests that they are here to delight and nourish themselves? How do you build someone’s appetite and increase sales? How do you offer a universe of possibilities and keep the menu simple? How do you make a passer-by a customer? How do you do it all on a budget?

Those are a lot of hard questions. For some reason, when ice cream and frozen yogurt are on the table, the answers come easy. White Design Studio worked with the existing store design and location and designed the environmental branding, the machine labels, the menu system and much of the phrasing and selling system to complete a great yogurt retail space. It has everything we love about the national chains and everything we love about the local ice cream parlor.

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A friend of ours has had a yogurt shop for years, long before the current craze. So to compete in the current marketplace of well-branded, fun, delightful yogurt stores, she needed to re-present herself to the public.

We helped her engineer a name that was fun and pointed to her specific value to the consumer. “So Your Yogurt” and the “YoYo” toy help to make up SoYo. Like the name, customers are invited to create their own delightful mashups of yogurt and fresh, delicious toppings. And unlike other chains, SoYo offers ice cream, smoothies and non-dairy treats so there is something that’s So Yours, no matter who you are.

Visit SoYo in Centerville, OH. Tell them White Design Studio sent you.

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