Client

Officeworks

Agency

AKQA, 2020

Role

Experience Designer

Overview

My Role

During my time at AKQA, I was “making bigger things happen” on the Officeworks account. One of the projects I worked on in 2020 was the design of their e-mail stream ‘Noteworthy’. I worked end to end on this project from the research and discovery phase to client and developer handover. I worked closely with the client at every stage of the project and found joy in educating and collaborating with them.

Although consistent and engaging, the Officeworks emails had been sales driven and functional. They were ready to send out more informative and educational content to their subscribers. Officeworks were in the process of launching their new education hub called ‘Noteworthy’. They felt the best way to promote Noteworthy was through a weekly eDM.

The Challenge

Our challenge was to design a dynamic email template that would cater for different types of content and articles as well as establish a design that felt distinctly separate from the usual Officeworks brand. The team at Officeworks were keen to be able to input the content themselves so the templates had to be consistent and the design system well documented.

Approach

The research

We started an extensive research process of looking at other examples of business’s sending out similar communications such as newsletters, educational content and blogs to establish what was considered ‘best in class’. We identified considerations and key decisions Officeworks needed to make for the Noteworthy program. One of the considerations was looking at the e-mail as a platform, we learnt that publishers were rethinking the role that email plays in the digital space. We learnt that email was increasingly being used as a complete experience in its own right rather than just a channel to push subscribers to a website.

From the landscape review we established that the Noteworthy e-mails had to be:

• Gentle, thoughtful and well-curated

• Engaging and informative

• An e-mail that readers look forward to receiving each month

• A distinctively different experience from existing Officeworks e-mails they receive

Process

After analysing the research and establishing the consistent patterns we realised that just one template wasn’t going to be able to house all the different types of content the client wanted to send.

We began to wireframe different layouts for the different streams. For example, we wanted the kid's educational content to feel different from the business content. We produced multiple wireframes that were then stress tested with real content - this provided an insight into how flexible the templates would have to be.

Solution

We established a functional set of modules and templates for the emails that were flexible enough to house both education and business streams of content. The modules and templates were designed to flex whilst also maintaining the consistency of the Officeworks/Noteworthy brand.

The 3 systems we established were:

Hero It

• This is used for articles and content that is unrelated to each other, using a hero article at the top of the email to attract the reader’s attention.

Theme it

• Is for content that has a clear relationship and theme, the idea being there is a bespoke image created that relates to the theme of all the articles.

Break it down

• For one interesting article that can be easily broken down into dot points and lists. Use pull quotes, images etc to create a long-form email.

The Design System

The design system is the single source of truth that allowed us and the client to design and develop campaigns swiftly, ensuring they were always on-brand. The style guide includes graphic styles such as colours, fonts, patterns illustrations and more, as well as how they should be used.

As a single source of truth, the system reduced design efficiencies as even the smallest detail is accounted for so more time can be spent focusing on the wider design strategy.

Key Learnings

“Go back to the research”

It’s so easy to get lost and overwhelmed especially when you’re designing a product that has so many endless possibilities. Every time I would hit a dead-end or a block I would say to myself “go back to the research”. The file I had put together was an incredible reference point where I would go for inspiration.

Documentation is key

To design and develop e-mail templates that a client with no design background is going to use, documenting and education is key to the success of the designs. A well-documented design system is essential and holding educational sessions with the client on how to use the templates really paid off.