I was brought in by a local design agency to help them with the user experience portion of a project they had with a major food brand. The marketing team at the company gave some guidance to the agency that they liked what the team had done for another product. The technology being used at the time was Flash and that was my limiting factor as far as user experience was concerned.
Version 1
Using the input I received from the agency about the customer and their goals, I created a first version of the wireframes. I understood that the agency wanted to utilize a lot of motion and that the customer wanted the site to be engaging. So I tried to use best-practice UX techniques while keeping the spirit of the all-Flash design in tact.
Unfortunately, this initial wireframe did not meet the customer's needs.
The Problem
From a UX perspective, I realized that I didn't understand what the customer was trying to solve. The Director at the agency did not want to pull me into the customer meetings since I was an outside contractor. They weren't able to articulate the problem, they didn't know why their ideas were not landing with the customer. I thought that maybe the problem was below the surface, that maybe the customer didn't exactly know how to explain it. So I was able to convince them to allow me to listen to their next customer call, and I heard one sentence that succinctly explained their problem.
"We don't want to be commodities based."
Upon hearing this statement, I went back to the drawing board and created a new version of the site that focused less on the items they sell and more around what they wanted to mean to people when they though of the brand.
Version 2
This next version landed much better with the customer. The site was designed around the lifestyle of the user, rather than the individual products from the customer. And even though I had an issue with an all-Flash version of a site, I was happy to apply UX best-practices to this format for a site.
While the original version of this site is lost to the annals of history, the customer ended up choosing not to use a Flash-only version of their site, which was a win in my book.
