NeoCon & Steelcase.com 2017
Currently it’s NeoCon season for Steelcase. NeoCon is one of the biggest design conferences for commercial interior design. We have a big presence at the Chicago show every June—a swanky showroom promoting new research, new product and new thinking on existing product.
For the web team I’m on the start of NeoCon marks the end of our busiest season. The new research, product and campaigns we tout at the event need various amouts of web content to support them. Even existing web content gets a facelift before the show. It’s all hands on deck to make sure our website shines.
Here are a few NeoCon related web projects I worked on this year.
Umami Lounge Seating
This lounge product is a big part of our showroom this year.
I worked with the product marketing team and design vendor to build the page using layouts that made the most sense for the copy and imagery. We were aiming to organize the content and images in a distinct way to tell a story about Umami’s modularity/custom configuration, which takes lots of collaboration and communication from several teams to accomplish.
Steelcase Series 1
This new office desk chair launched at the conference this year.
Similar to Umami, I built this page collaborating with the product marketing team and design vendor. The big story for Steelcase Series 1 is its range of material customization. The vibrant images and video were key to getting that point across.
SOTO Personal Console
A lot of the layout legwork was already completed by a coworker of mine for this desktop storage/device charging product.
I had the easy job of plugging in content and working with the product marketer to make sure this page was up to speed.
360 Research Subscribe Experience
A redesign of the 360 Research section of our site launched right before NeoCon.
My team worked feverishly to make sure all existing content was tagged and set appropriately to display in the new experience.
Beyond that I lead a project to employ a subscription footer experience to users. With visuals from a design vendor and with a targeted/technology vendor I got this feature up and running. My job was to think through the user experience of the footer—how should it behave, display, what should links look like, where should users go when they click on those links, what should the experience be for users who are already subscribed or who don’t want to subscribe?
There was a lot of internal collaboration involved in getting the experience right—especially as we were looking to launch this logically detailed footer at the same time as the redesign and didn’t have much opportunity for pre-launch testing.
Targeted Homepage Banner Ads
We have a handful of homepage banner ads live for NeoCon. A few of them I worked on specifically. They’re ads that display depending on the user and user behavior. This was super fun to think through and a good stretch for us in a relationship with an existing vendor.
I’m hoping to look at the data related to these specific ads and see higher engagement rates because the content is more closely tailored to the viewer.
While a lot of these projects are now on my checked off “done” list, a lot of them just scratch the surface of what we’re able to do on our site. From using our site to inspire to showing tailored content and experiences we’ve got a lot more creative thinking and web potential ahead of us.
For the web team I’m on the start of NeoCon marks the end of our busiest season. The new research, product and campaigns we tout at the event need various amouts of web content to support them. Even existing web content gets a facelift before the show. It’s all hands on deck to make sure our website shines.
Here are a few NeoCon related web projects I worked on this year.
Umami Lounge Seating
This lounge product is a big part of our showroom this year.
I worked with the product marketing team and design vendor to build the page using layouts that made the most sense for the copy and imagery. We were aiming to organize the content and images in a distinct way to tell a story about Umami’s modularity/custom configuration, which takes lots of collaboration and communication from several teams to accomplish.
Steelcase Series 1
This new office desk chair launched at the conference this year.
Similar to Umami, I built this page collaborating with the product marketing team and design vendor. The big story for Steelcase Series 1 is its range of material customization. The vibrant images and video were key to getting that point across.
SOTO Personal Console
A lot of the layout legwork was already completed by a coworker of mine for this desktop storage/device charging product.
I had the easy job of plugging in content and working with the product marketer to make sure this page was up to speed.
360 Research Subscribe Experience
A redesign of the 360 Research section of our site launched right before NeoCon.
My team worked feverishly to make sure all existing content was tagged and set appropriately to display in the new experience.
Beyond that I lead a project to employ a subscription footer experience to users. With visuals from a design vendor and with a targeted/technology vendor I got this feature up and running. My job was to think through the user experience of the footer—how should it behave, display, what should links look like, where should users go when they click on those links, what should the experience be for users who are already subscribed or who don’t want to subscribe?
There was a lot of internal collaboration involved in getting the experience right—especially as we were looking to launch this logically detailed footer at the same time as the redesign and didn’t have much opportunity for pre-launch testing.
Targeted Homepage Banner Ads
We have a handful of homepage banner ads live for NeoCon. A few of them I worked on specifically. They’re ads that display depending on the user and user behavior. This was super fun to think through and a good stretch for us in a relationship with an existing vendor.
I’m hoping to look at the data related to these specific ads and see higher engagement rates because the content is more closely tailored to the viewer.
While a lot of these projects are now on my checked off “done” list, a lot of them just scratch the surface of what we’re able to do on our site. From using our site to inspire to showing tailored content and experiences we’ve got a lot more creative thinking and web potential ahead of us.