Brief

"Help us design and develop a new transactional website that reflects our position as the number one producer and brand in the stock image market."

Image Source is a leading independent producer of royalty-free stock photography. Although the company markets itself as a premium supplier – with core brand values such as quality, innovation, fearlessness and contemporariness – its website did not reflect this positioning. Years of haphazard development had also seriously compromised the site's user experience.

This meant that Image Source lagged behind its competitors when it came to utilising the web as both a retail and a brand communications channel. As a result, Image Source turned to Tobias & Tobias in 2007 and asked us to define a stable interface and direction for the design and development of a new site that would: 

• Communicate its core brand values
• Position it as a premium supplier of royalty-free stock photography
• Increase online sales revenue

Strategy/Execution 

We worked across two key service streams, user experience and visual design, to create a bold, inventive and striking new website that captured the Image Source brand. By taking an approach that combined creativity with the inventive use of web interface technologies, we produced a design that was both daring and highly usable.

The project comprised a number of phases:

Analysis

As the first step in this project, we conducted an in-depth review of:

• The existing Image Source website
• New wireframes and information architecture already produced by Image Source
• Competitor websites

User experience design

Post-analysis, we focused on developing a robust framework for the new site – one that fully supported all key user journeys and created the optimal user experience.

We did this by:

• Defining the key personas that would ultimately use with the website
• Recruiting people that matched these person for user research
• Conducting intensive user research to validate our assumptions about competitor websites and our early design iterations
• Using our research findings to refine the information architecture, wireframes and our own designs before conducting further testing 

Visual design

In keeping with Image Source's brand positioning, we created a bold and striking new visual identity that differentiated the website from its competitors, optimised the user experience and made it a joy to use.

We achieved this by employing a highly innovative approach, which incorporated:

• A radically transformed homepage: We stripped out all content apart from the search function, primary navigation and a powerful background image. This gave priority to the primary user journey and allowed images that exemplify the company's brand to take centre stage.
• A clean, spacious and monochromatic visual design: This allows the site to become a true showcase for Image Source's products by giving them prominence on every page, with no unnecessary distractions.
• More intuitive navigation metaphors: Vertical scrolling has been eliminated and replaced it with horizontal navigation, which is more suited to scanning large amounts of visual information.
• An emphasis on the primary user journey at every stage: Search and purchase functionality was given visual prominence over all other content.
• Rich, interactive experiences: For example, we introduced the ability to drag and drop images around the screen to make the purchase process easier and more intuitive.

Results

The new website went live in October 2008. Every aspect of the site – from design elements such as layout and typography, through to navigation and interactivity – now reinforces Image Source's brand values. And unlike its competitors' websites, Image Source's site looks and feels like a premium ‘boutique', with a pioneering design that pushes the boundaries without sacrificing usability.

The site promises to increase revenue by making the online purchase process quicker and easier and by encouraging extended browsing and repeat purchases.