At Caravel Associates, by communicating with management, as well as, the marketing and the mobile app department, my partner and I worked on the product website for an in-development app-linked toy phone originally branded as Link and then to Linkie. The purpose of the toy is to connect family members across distances. The app allows for family to record a message and assign it a specific button on the toy for playback. I worked on various sections of the product's development including the initial WiX smokescreen website, color palette and logo rebranding, images used for marketing social media posts, and especially the official WiX website, including the sitemap, wireframes, and making most of the website.
I really enjoyed this experience, and learned a great amount, specifically about multi-department communication, work load, as well as, all the functionality of WiX Editor X. There were a few times where I was able to communicate my opinions and issues, and be heard by the team to fix them.
My first assignment was to fix their WiX smokescreen website that they've been using as a filler website for primarily marketing to research demand and pricing.
Another task that was asked of me while working on the website and its rebranding, was to help the marketing department create social media post images for Instagram. They gave me an idea, I created a very basic drawing of their idea, and my partner and I reiterated through Photoshop, Illustrator, and Canva. For insight, I chose to add the globe and paper airplanes to help fill the middle image as well as represent the whole aspect of communicating to family members to anywhere in the world.
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In addition, our client felt that the original logo could be improved as it was fairly simple and not cutesy enough for a children's toy. Hence we made different designs heavily inspired on sound waves and a bit on chain links.
Before pursuing any further marketing efforts, I expressed issue with the original color scheme using light pastel colors. Based on the fact that older individuals, like parents and grandparents, would be using the site, I felt that the original colors, which would be used for the text on the website, did not have enough contrast to satisfy accessibility standards. Using color contrast testers, such as, sdsdsd and sdsds, I looked at different color shades, and finalized one that would satisfy a 3.00 contrast level.
After rebranding, I needed to update the smokescreen again, but with the color and logo changes throughout the whole website, including the hero images.
Before creating the official website, I worked on a site map using Diagrams.net to establish what pages would be on the website. I initially included an account page, that would show all the recording and information used through the app and toy, but management said to not include it, as it would not be feasible at the time.
After creating the sitemap, I worked on the wireframes for the major pages of the website. Since we were using WiX, management wanted us to focus primarily on the major parts of the website, including the homepage, app, shop, and product page. The wireframes were fairly low-fidelity because we decided that we could make the higher fidelity versions through WiX itself.
As a new user of WiX products, I did most of my work on learning, manipulating, and creating about 80% of the website. This includes making the hero images, compositing images to reduce element clutter, formatting and alignment, making various redesigns for approval by client, and little bit of mobile responsiveness. For some of the pages, such as, the cart page and FAQ page, management permitted us to use WiX's templates, so we could focus our design efforts elsewhere.
After creating the home page and app page, the client was very adamant on working on mobile responsiveness as the next task. However, I felt that although it is a task that needs to be done eventually, I expressed that creating the rest of pages would be a better next step. My logic was that WiX worked web-first, so if web changes were made after the mobile site was created, it would lead to extra fixes. Another reason is that it would work better in terms of organization and handoff as we were nearing the end of the work experience. All the pages would be created, then made responsive on mobile, rather than make a page, then make it responsive, then work on the next page.
