Betsey Kershaw, a brilliant and omni-present red-headed force in the Minnesota marketing scene had just opened Union Park, an agile marketing shop in St Paul. They’d landed a new client and Betsey pulled me in as an information architect — tasked with untangling a sprawling network of micro sites. But what started as a simple cleanup matured into a new and powerful web app.
Skyline is one of the largest exhibit manufacturers in the world. They help thousands of companies design and build everything from a single-person booth you can fold into your suitcase, to immersive experiences the size of a city block.
Skyline was poised to enter the digital economy, but a standard ecommerce website with a list of SKUs and a shopping cart wouldn’t capture the most valuable service Skyline provides. Exhibit design is a science - and Skyline’s expert sales staff work with their clients to hone marketing messages, collage eye-catching materials and improve traffic flow. This collaboration is the foundation of Skyline’s success, but limited to phone calls and in-person meetings, the sales teams were over-scheduled and overwhelmed.
Before skyline.com could become a place for sales and clients to meet, it needed a thorough cleaning. Working with Harrison Lloyd I scoured over a thousand pages — seven years worth of micro sites and abandoned initiatives — finally piecing together a new narrative for Skyline’s products, process, and industry knowledge. From this content plan I drafted 12 templates and 6 interchangeable responsive modules to deliver the content across a spectrum of devices.
How do you turn a website into a collaborative studio? We broke it down into two phases: inspiration and approval. The primary call to action on the Skyline website prompts users to begin designing their own personalized exhibit. Users are then led through account creation, paired with a local sales person, and given a visual board of images and articles they share with their sales rep. By uploading and annotating images in this shared space, the sales rep and client can begin to define layout, material, and styles that meet the clients need. Every image in Skyline’s extensive library of exhibits can be added to these boards, and pixel perfect annotation allows specific details to be discussed.
The collaborative sandbox serves the uniquely visual process of designing an exhibit. Once the parameters have been defined, an official RFP is completed by the client, and Skyline’s design team drafts 3D models of the final exhibit. Renders of the exhibits are posted to the clients boards where they can be refined through annotation and given final approval. For the first time, Skyline’s sales team had a purely digital means to take their clients through a fully customized purchase.
Skyline.com is online now, and has been bringing new life to the business. As the sales teams are trained in on the digital sales and approval system, I'll post the lift in lead generation and efficiencies it's created. Come back soon for more details, or stop by skyline.com to kick the tires yourself.
Client: Skyline Exhibits
Project Lead: Patty Henderson
Interactive Producer: Harrison Lloyd
Visual Design: Flaco Zacarias
Development: Software for Good