GP Advertising

Website and Interface Design

Team: Digital
Role: Digital Designer
Manager: Johnnie Crawford

Overview

GP Advertising is an in-house agency servicing Harvey Norman, Domayne and Joyce Mayne’s digital and print advertising efforts. As a member of the digital design team, I was asked to concept an update for the agency's website while working on BAU projects.

For prospective employees

Meeting with internal stakeholders, a simple black and white visual direction was chosen. We also identified that the purpose of the website was for first impressions for prospective employees. From user journey research, most users would be coming to the website from a job ad. They’d be wanting to get an impression of the agency and its work. Since GP is an in-house agency, a point of difference from other typical agencies, that was emphasised on the Home page above the fold instead of high quality project imagery.

Figma wireframes for the Home and About pages

A “Back to our work” button was placed at the end of projects to keep users easily moving through the website and browsing the agencies work.

Figma wireframes for the Work and Project pages

Something’s wrong

Here I then realised that the website was lacking a point of difference, I knew that what made GP unique was it’s people and culture. But I had failed to emphasise that, so I readjusted.

Emphasising the people

Change 1: Instead of high quality project imagery on the home page, I put staff front and centre with imagery/videos of them working behind the scenes. Change 2: I moved the team focused content of the ‘About Us’ page into it’s own ‘Our Team’ page that fully showcased GP’s people and culture, while the home pages CTA brought the user there. Change 3: The ‘Our Team’ page would also have profiles for each manager, allowing the user to get familiar with the person that may be interviewing them.

Taking infomation from ‘About Us’ and adjusting into a new ‘Our Team’ page

Layout highlights

With these adjustments, the proposed redesign was presented and well receieved, though unfortunately my tenure finished before it could be developed and shipped.

Home page

Our Team page

Project page

What I learnt

Using a set of predefined spacing measurements is a massive time saver when making decisions for layout. I lost focus of the websites purpose by being too fixated on visual references. I learnt that identifying the purpose of the website and what a user wants from it provides a north star that helps avoid loosing that focus.
Next time I’d further define the exact content of text-heavy pages earlier. By identifying what’s being said, I can better understand if all pieces of content are working together or not.

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