Project Overview
Planex are a specialist Australian manufacturer and designer of high end commercial and storage furniture. We were engaged to craft a website that showcases their unique product range, as well as providing a streamlined and elegant way of revealing the detailed technical specs of each item.
The result: a timeless, sophisticated site with an advanced search and highly visual treatment, making discovery straightforward and easy. The striking navigation and clean, crisp design beautifully captures the organisation’s unique offering, ensuring the user can immediately identify with the brand, products and projects of Planex.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Creative Director - Mack Nevill
Senior Designer - Warren Everard
Project Manager - Catherine Young
Frontend Developers - David Pike, Sean Bullock
Backend Developers - Kim Wuestkamp, Arjen Schwarz
Digital Strategist - Anne Koch
Project Brief
The previous Planex website was outdated, and failed to meet the needs of key audiences. Planex approached Evolution 7 needing a website to better showcase products, provide information and tools that users needed, and deliver users an online experience that befits their innovative furniture and storage solutions.
Planex needed a website that allowed them to showcase their products in a highly visual manner, with a comprehensive range of information, resources and tools for end users. The website needed to meet the needs of the key audiences - architects, designers, builders, and their prospective clients - and deliver a consistent, elegant experience across devices from mobile to desktop.
Project Innovation/Need
With amazing product images, and images of the products in situ in completed fit out projects, Planex had great visual assets to be featured. Large, full-width images are used across the site, with the product pages as a point of difference with a large isolated product image featured. The full fluid layout allows the content and images to be displayed large at any browser size.
The website features a site navigation fixed to the left-hand column, remaining tethered to the top edge across the website and moving to a top orientation at smaller breakpoints. As a fully responsive website, the modular approach to the design allows for a smooth transition to touch devices and an immersive experience at desktop.
Design Challenge
The key design challenge was delivering such a carefully architected and minimalist aesthetic across a range of devices and keeping the experiences consistent at a huge range of resolutions and devices sizes. The nature of a pared back approach also meant the slightest imposition misalignment was noticeable, and significant effort was invested in making sure the site responded in a fluid and considered fashion at every scale and resolution.
Each of Planex’s products comes with a number of technical specifications and associated documents available for download, as well as brochures, colour options and product drawings. We worked with Planex to identify the key assets for each user group, and group them in a way that allows for users to interact and reveal the additional content if interested, or to simply browse the products and enjoy the product gallery.
User Experience
With a highly creative target audience, the Planex website was never going to be a simple product offering. The website delivers a highly refined and sophisticated digital experience that explores the adaptive design philosophy of Planex along with their beautiful range of products.
The new website experience has also certainly delivered in terms in engagement, with visits up by over 100% from the previous year (Aug 2015 vs Aug 2014), with significantly increased pageviews and other key metrics.
Digital Experience - Website - Product
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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