WEBSITE & UI/UX DESIGN
Sphere is a brand new approach to shopping online, putting you into an immersive universe while you shop your favourite products.
ROLES
Overview
In Autumn 2021, Mrs Wordsmith hired the company, Sphere, to create a brand new website experience to test against the traditional mrswordsmith.com website in an AB test. I, an illustrator and manager worked with Sphere to bring the Mrs Wordsmith universe to life and ensure the company vision was projected in the project. I was tasked to represent design in the collaboration but also directed UI, UX, content and pitched visual illustration concepts to Sphere's art director and our illustrator.
Sphere
Sphere is a literal sphere in which the user can drag and zoom, rather than scroll, through a fish eye view of a dimensional environment in an internet browser. It benefits from limiting number of clicks and enhancing product discovery since it is easy to dictate the user journey without losing the adventure of exploring the world.
UI Design
Alphabet City
The Mrs Wordsmith characters live in a world named Alphabet City, which was chosen to be introduced for the first time to our audience through the Sphere website. With this in mind, we landed on a concept which reflects the real world with a few surprises and divided into areas like a school, the city, park, mountains and suburbia. I decided to group products by age groups in the environment, add age range indicators and introduce product lists organised by type to solve the problem of how to create an organised way to view products which fits our users' needs without any filtering features.
Visually, we made a style guide featuring vector, non-line art for the environment, classic illustrations for the characters and rules for where and how the characters were to be used. Additionally, Alphabet City includes easter eggs to find free resources and go through small narrative journeys to strengthen the experience and new Mrs Wordsmith brand. I reviewed all work made by Sphere and gave specific visual concept and content directions to align with the company and stakeholder goals.
Visual Concept Development Pitch Sketches
