Designing a platform for every woman
Future Women
Designing a platform for every woman
Future Women
Being the Editor in Chief of Australian Women’s Weekly for some 7 years (...amongst a number of other high profile editorial gigs, The Australian etc), you might figure Helen McCabe was well credentialed to envision a new platform for women.
Though this new entity set out to be much more than just a another content play.
Future Women sought to be a club for savvy women to connect, learn and lead
In their words, Future Women is ‘a space committed to the success of women, to the advancement of women, and most importantly, to supporting women’.
So Pollen’s initial remit was to work closely with the Future Women team in order to define and design the platform that would help facilitate this ambition.
We started by understanding the preliminary brand work, then through a series of Project Context workshops led by our UX team, we began to better understand the desired feature set and functionality that they wanted to achieve – there was a lot.
We prioritised features based on two factors
What delivers the most value (Value Proposition), and what makes them unique (USP).
Once we aligned on priorities for the business, our UX team set to mapping the experience. Everything from ‘What really is Future Women?’, through to ‘I need to join, just tell me how much’ and ‘Help me connect with like-minded inspirational women’. The site had many jobs to be done. We took over a wall at Pollen HQ and set about creating one giant experience map.
Building an experience map collaboratively helped everyone understand the importance of customer experience
With the experience and architecture refined we set about defining the look - from the original brand explorations.
Through use of typography, colour and illustration to support the vibrant content produced by the FW team.
Working closely with the in-house design team we brought the style to life
Building the platform would be an even bigger undertaking. Connecting a publishing platform with an events engine and an online community, meant we had to lean on the shoulder of giants and choose the right products to integrate with.
With the first major platform release completed on time and budget, new features and functionality will be continually groomed and added to the core platform using our agile product methodology. In addition, we are about to begin the next major ‘supporting women’ phase – the FW Academy (WATCH THIS SPACE)
Become a Future Woman.
