The Challenge
This project undertaken as an employee at Newpath.
In 2023, due to a competitive market, there was a need to upgrade Gossi Park's website towards a modern market standard to increase users engagement and experience. They believed increasing visual appeal would drive customers towards their product offerings and increase the likelihood of sales opportunities.
Gossi Park also wanted to expand on their web-presence to increase public awareness of their brand and products. They sought to extend their minimal brand guidelines through the website and to better emphasise their business ethos.
The Solution
To provide a comprehensive solution for Gossi Park I undertook key workshops and tasks, including:
Conducting user persona and optimal user journey workshops, which highlighted many opportunities that have been featured within the interface designs
Mapping out the existing information architecture to better understand the current flow of their website
Creating wireframes to discuss and iterate upon page structures and functionalities
Implementing wow with interface designs and prototypes to demonstrate the flow of the website
Modernisation
As key criteria for Gossi Park was to branch towards a modern market, so during our workshop to analyse competitors I presented them with various designs to determine what this meant to them. Surprisingly, their team leant towards a design I showed them with a minimalistic asymmetrical layout. This was music to my ears as I am a strong advocate for minimalism and the less is more approach to design.
To achieve a modern design in the eye’s of Gossi Park, I made key design decisions including:
Opting for an asymmetric layout where possible
Providing ample white space to allow the content to breathe
Propelling the use of strong, no fuss imagery
Adding a light green background with a pattern overlay to add interest on ‘About Gossi Park’ and ‘Environmental Strategy’ pages
Implementing unusual left and right menu sliders
Product Configuration
To improve the consumer experience, Gossi Park sought to implement a product configurator that would minimise the back and forth between their sales team and a customer. As this was a new functionality for their site there was a lot of back and forth to design the optimal experience. After many discussions, key features we landed upon included:
Distinguishing colours and sizes they can quickly produce over customised ones to boost sales
Showcasing thumbnails of finishes, colours, and variations of certain elements of a product
Adding a configured product, or multiple products, to a ‘cart’ to send an enquiry with exact specifications
Adding the ‘Wow’
Throughout the design process, Gossi Park leant towards a less conventional approach to interface. This inspired me to delve deeper into adding that ‘wow’ factor to their website through micro interactions. Examples of these include:
A page load animation
Sectioning the homepage and about pages into full height blocks so content appears on top of each other on scroll
Adding hotspots to project images to direct users to product pages
Left slide out menus to for products and right slide out menu for additional pages, or the cart functionality
Configurator modal window
We thank Newpath for designing and building our new Gossi website. The regular team meetings, good communication and collaborative nature were key to getting this project over the line successfully
Quote from Gossi's General Manager, Mark Sands (Sourced from Newpath's