After establishing our visual framework, it was time to put into action our freshly minted visual guidelines… Our Web 3.0 for 2019 Q2 was the right candidate. After the Creative Brief above (Goals, Strategy, Roadmap,) we had to create the content. Luckily we had an internal team for that. Leadership and Marketing teams honed the new spin of our Support Automation and Expert-In-The-Loop narrative for weeks on end.
Second, we had to design the website to host that content. And yes, we have an internal team for that as well… But design needs visual ingredients like photography. If you are a designer, you know this type of asset does not come cheap. You either use available stock photography and look like anybody else (And by this I mean anybody in Pharma, Banking, or Real State. Bland, cliched stock images discriminate against nobody) … or you hire expensive photographers to attain an authentic look.
We had a better idea: Crowdsource your exclusive photography!
A petition was sent to 1,543 current experts (those active during last month) … inviting them to be part of our regular hackathon!
Specifics on what we wanted was documented, with tips on how to achieve decent photography with inexpensive means. We provided examples on what to avoid (highlighting potential issues, so to avoid too much curation, filtering, and editing on our side).
Finally, we provided rules, established deadline, managed participant’s email and obtained legal releases.Despite the few results (it was after all a 24-hour time-limited exercise). The results were very encouraging: 31 submissions were received, coming from Texas, Michigan, Florida… but also Spain, Italy, Kenya, Chile, India, Philippines, China, Senegal, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Malta, Ecuador.
We adopted a common color filter (black and white, with yellow colorization) to homogenize most of the portraits into the most consistent style we could muster out of such diverse user-generated content... We featured all selected experts in a rotation of our home page:
We also applied user-generated images on every page. From Industries (Gaming, Wireless, Technology)...
… to Resources (Blog, Reports & Webinars)
… as well as About Us page, Resources...
… Careers, Integrations:
… Platform & Customers:
… And of course, the exciting forms (i.e Schedule a Demo) and all the text-heavy pages (Sample Trust page, I will spare you the legal, copyright, terms, etc).
Final touch? We had fun using some bloopers and candids for our 404 pages!
