Image Credit : Photography: Alexandra Adoncello
Project Overview
Mama’s Buoi is a new chain of boutique Vietnamese restaurants, which in essence are a memoir of the founder’s childhood in Australia. More succinctly the restaurants are a dedication to his mother, by featuring her unique Vietnamese home-cooked culinary influences, infused with a modern twist. The family narrative is unmistakable within the restaurant walls – the interior design reinforces this theme by creating cosy vibes through vibrant décor and photos of precious family memories adorning the walls. To match the impressive ambience, the food is equally delightful, with mouth-watering flavours evermore enhanced by the environment. Each dish is unique, but never strays far from its traditional Vietnamese heritage, using fresh ingredients that are staple to any Vietnamese household – served straight from Mama’s kitchen direct to your plate.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Irwin Hau - Creative Director
Josh Chan - Account Manager
Leslie Lau - Designer
Edmond Halley - Developer
Tim Malone - Developer
Project Brief
Following the buzz surrounding the restaurants - already featured in various media outlets and food publications - Mama’s Buoi required a digital retail experience that would accurately reflect their flagship Sydney restaurants. The website needed to encapsulate the in-store retail atmosphere – to the point where the user could experience Mama’s Buoi’s family-based ethos regardless of their locality, thus further enhancing and consolidating the already existing retail service of their restaurants.
Our task was to create a holistic pre and post retail service experience – to effectively merge the online and offline spheres – allowing the user to have an ongoing retail awareness of the Mama’s Buoi brand even when they are away from the store. The wow-factor would stem from the visual elements, akin to the décor of the restaurants themselves, however adhering to digital best-practice by keeping responsive web design and unique user experience at the forefront of the project. The overarching theme was to proficiently fuse functionality with design, allowing the user to be engaged in the Mama’s Buoi atmosphere as much as possible - creating the scene for tasting the food itself.
Project Innovation/Need
As the Mama’s Buoi interior design complimented the home-style dishes that were offered, we envisioned a digital retail platform that would echo the same aesthetic in the online sphere. To bring the restaurants to life, we virtually placed the user inside the restaurant, and subsequent pages are presented as though the user is wandering freely within the Mama’s Buoi walls. We implemented side-scrolling functionality to give this effect, and also subtle parallax movements of various layered elements to further instil the immersive experience. We incorporated a dynamic randomised “Mama Hoang’s Sayings” feature on the front page, to immediately present the user with the authentic Vietnamese sayings of Mama Hoang, conveying a homely Vietnamese vibe upon first glance.
With such a unique design, responsive design was a priority and was thoroughly considered to accommodate for tablets and mobiles, as the majority of digital media is consumed through mobile devices. Backend CMS functionality was also a priority, as many of the pages throughout the website would be client managed. More succinctly, we custom built this project upon a beautiful frontend aesthetic that would maintain its design integrity cross-devices, whilst being bolstered by a robust, yet user-friendly backend.
Design Challenge
The primary challenge was to apply a creative interpretation for the commonly bland hospitality websites - as the Mama’s Buoi brand itself is the polar opposite, evident in their use of eclectic colours and pattern combinations. As mentioned in the brief, the visual elements needed to shine through, hence we needed to simplify a large amount of content, as the website was to house and present the content (most importantly the menus!) for the various locations of Mama’s Buoi restaurants.
Being an immersive site, the challenge was to present clear call to actions within the design itself, as elements would need to be identifiable within the site. Because the Mama's Buoi desktop site strays away from conventional website design format and structure of "boxes", we were presented with the challenge of catering to responsive design - and we did it whilst retaining design consistency, from a mobile viewport all the way to a 27 inch iMac.
Future Impact
The clear call to actions within the design allow the user to navigate to the core functions of the website (reservation, catering and menu), which are expected features for hospitality websites. These call to actions become more prevalent in the mobile version, to allow for greater ease for the user to make a booking, order catering, or view the menu. Where other sites become text-based in the mobile version, we're extremely proud it holds true to the design by maintaining but keeping to a minimum the experience-based imagery and moving transitions - you'd almost think you're on the desktop site.
On the client side, there has been increased booking numbers and enquiries, and greater engagement in the Mama’s Buoi brand once this digital platform had been established. In addition, within 12 hours of the site launching, we even received calls from other creatives in regards to how we executed particular functionality elements and the method in which we executed the Mama’s Buoi project, which was a real compliment to the team, whose efforts on this project would make any Mama proud!
Service - Retail
This award celebrates creative and innovative design in the retail environment. Consideration given to attracting, engaging and motivating customers to make purchases, the use of colour, lighting, space, product information, sensory inputs (smell, touch, sound) as well as technologies such as digital displays and interactive installations.
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