IDEO Automobility
A Webby-winning, highly interactive microsite
IDEO was opening a new area of its consulting practice. They were helping the auto industry see the future. They needed a way to help prospective clients visualize this future.
Engineering teams, product developers, and executives in companies within the auto industry all needed new ways of seeing where their industry was headed.
Without a clear and innovative way for IDEO to get the word out about their new consulting offering, no one would benefit from their expertise.
Solspace took IDEO's initial designs, implemented, and launched the new Automobility microsite in about 3 months.
Solspace created an original Javascript and CSS framework to support the demanding user interactions of Automobility. This framework was then ready for use on other IDEO marketing initiatives.
IDEO and Solspace won Webbys for their work on Automobility. You can see the most recent version of the site at [automobility.ideo.com](automobility.ideo.com).
Of course, it's old news now, but back when we helped IDEO build and launch their Automobility microsite, highly interactive, parallax scrolling user interactions in a web browser were relatively new. There was still much work to be done to make the interactions smooth and the system clean and fluid. When you get out on the edge as we did, you sometimes get noticed. Hence the Webbys!
With almost every client on almost every project, we're storytellers. That feeling was even more acute on the IDEO Automobility project. There was an urgency to tell a story well. IDEO needed to communicate new ideas quickly and easily to executives who have very little time. By merging imagery, text, data briefs, and interactions into a cohesive whole, we helped IDEO quickly get their vision for the automotive industry across.
Among the many technical challenges we had to meet with Automobility was the page load challenge. IDEO is incredibly meticulous about design fidelity. They should be. That's the core business: design excellence. In order to meet their exacting quality standards, we had to make sure that the largest, high-resolution images were available in the browser as quickly as possible. Combine that with the fact that we were anticipating that the microsite would see unpredictable traffic spikes and we realized we needed to lean heavily on CDN technology. We helped IDEO develop a CDN strategy that leveraged Amazon's CloudFront systems. The result was page loads and user interactions that felt seamless and flawless.
Solspace is extraordinarily proud of the impact this dynamic partnership with IDEO has achieved, and the recognition of this achievement by the public as well as our peers in the technology industry. The Automobility concepts have been featured in multiple publications since launch, including the following:
