Graphic Design
Alfa Romeo Jim Ellis
UI/UX DESIGN & Marketing Campaign
“Are you an ALFA TYPE?” is an interactive web experience created for Alfa Romeo Jim Ellis to attract new customers and create brand awareness.
INTRODUCTION
Alfa Romeo Jim Ellis is a local Atlanta car dealership, specifically the three models of Alfa Romeo cars. While working as a media/UI designer at Cumulus Media, Alfa Romeo Jim Ellis approached our digital marketing team with a task to create a landing page to help them promote test drives. They requested that we launch a small marketing campaign to bring more awareness to the brand locally. What started as a simple request to create a simple landing page, turned into a larger marketing concept.
DESIGN TEAM
The digital design team consisted of myself, another designer, and the design director. Together, we brainstormed and conceptualized the full marketing campaign.
My main role as one of the UI designers was to work through the entire user experience of the radio listener. I helped idealize the campaign concept, work through user research, and create mockups of the design.
USER RESEARCH
Understanding the Problem
For many customers who are looking to purchase a new car, Alfa Romeo is often times not a contender. One of the main recognized issues is the lack of brand recognition within the automobile industry’s stiff competition. When speaking to car salesmen, we discovered that most of the customers that step foot in an Alfa Romeo dealership know the brand and have a genuine interest. However, new customers that are unaware of the brand are quite rare, as the car brand is not as readily recognized.
Understanding the User & Target Audience
Our first goal was to understand who the customer is and in this case, the “listener” was. Since we were a digital team within a radio station company, the initial radio advertisement would play to all rush-hour drivers listening to our station, but we wanted to hypothesize ‘what type of listener would it most attract?’ Due to time restrictions, we were unable to conduct our own personal user research. However, after speaking to the managers at Alfa Romeo, we determined that there were 3 typical types of customers, and created user personas for each of them:
User Personas
John Hardy
Laura Vance
Brandon Toshey
USER JOURNEY
Since Alfa Romeo had already purchased Radio advertisements for their business, we made sure to include this in the overall user journey. We wanted to work through an overall user experience to determine how to best engage the customer and hopefully complete the conversion from customer to test driver, and in turn… a sale.
The MARKETING CAMPAIGN
We then began crafting the concept for the marketing campaign before we split off to create each element (radio ad & website). Since we were looking for a way to force Alfa Romeo into the potential customer’s consideration set, our goal was to create a solution to bring additional awareness to the brand and attract more customers by allowing them to interact with the brand itself.
Radio Advertisement
The radio portion of the user experience was a key factor in the user’s journey ensuring that they are directed to the website.
After researching the brand, we came to the realization that the brand definitely attracts a certain type of person, in which we soon came to name the “Alfa-Type.” Together, we decided that this concept is what we would hook an interested listener to view the webpage.
The following radio advertisement was written and produced by Design Director: John Petrini (Cumulus Media).
Interactive Website
We were also particularly intrigued by the 3 different personas and came up with the concept of matching each persona to the 3 models of Alfa Romeo cars. Inspired by the recent influx of dating apps and websites, we decided to give each car model its own personality to match to its potential owner. We believe a quick and optional initial interaction would create a memorable positive experience in the user’s journey to view the car models.
Visual Branding
The design director had a vision of taking a modern spin on a retro Alfa Romeo concept when the brand was first marketed. He believed that true Alfa Romeo fans would be able to appreciate reminisce back to the early days of Alfa Romeo. And by taking a more modern twist to a retro style, new customers wouldn’t have to understand the reference to enjoy the unique spin on a car dealership website. My partner and I put together some mood boards and created the following branding graphics.
INTERACTIVE WEBSITE
USER FLOW
Low-Fidelity WireFrames
With the marketing campaign concept in mind and thinking about how the user would best engage with our experience, my partner and I then began the process of creating ideas interfaces. We started with these low-fidelity mockups with the goal of putting any UI thoughts down on paper. We worked with the design director to discuss which ideas made the most sense to the potential customer.
High Fidelity Mockups
Due to time and budget restrictions, my partner and I were unable to create a 2nd low fidelity wireframe from our sketches. While we would have preferred to complete a basic round of user testing on an interactive digitized mockup, we transitioned to creating high fidelity mockups using Adobe XD. We used graphical elements from the previously created visual branding, and created our first digital mockup.
Note: The mockup featured here is the FINAL mockup design created.
USER TESTING
Testing the Mockups
My partner and I did a few rounds of user testing with volunteer employees to begin the iteration process. Since the radio advertisement is geared towards working individuals, we thought this test group seemed appropriate. Together we gathered feedback that we were able to use to make improvements upon our mockup.
For example, we received feedback that users would be very tempted to skip the quiz if they are unsure how long it will take them. As a result, we made the following change:
WRAPPING UP
Development
As my partner and I began the development process, unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, the project was shelved until early 2020 and did not go into development. Moving forward, my partner and I decided to wrap up a few loose ends to ensure a successful re-launch in the future: documentation, file compilation, and an additional mockup for mobile development.
While this project came to an unexpected end, I am extremely pleased with the progress we made, and hope to see the campaign launch in 2020.
Interested in more information about this project?
United States Air Force Academy Military Ball
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Created the United States Air Force Academy Georgia Military Ball Logo.
Interested in more information about this project?
The Stone Grill
GRAPHIC DESIGN
The Stone Grill, a Korean BBQ restaurant in Duluth, GA requested for marketing/promotional materials for their recent rebranding. I created a magazine ad spread for the Atlanta Magazine, a social media graphic, and a infographic placemat. The Stone Grill owner’s vision was to share his passion for quality meat.
Interested in more information about this project?
iolight
UI/UX DESIGN
Iolight is an invention idea that was created for the Inventure Prize, “an interdisciplinary innovation competition open to all undergraduate students and recent graduates of the Georgia Institute of Technology” (inventureprize.gatech.edu). I worked with a fellow student to ideate, research, design, and begin the development of a sleeping mask that makes the process of falling asleep and waking up as efficient and easy as possible.
BACKGROUND
Sleep is the foundation of life and the fuel for innovation and progress; however, only half of Americans get the recommended amount of sleep and this leads to reduced focus, mood, and efficiency. It’s an unending cycle – restlessness, inability to fall asleep at night, grogginess, and laziness in the morning. All of these problems reduce the total amount of time that we sleep.
Before entering the Inventure Prize, we already had an idea, as we both had sleep problems. Personally, I always had trouble waking up, while my teammate, however, always found it difficult to fall asleep. And while being at an institution, as sleep-deprived as Georgia Tech, we were came up with Iolight.
MARKET RESEARCH
The sleep industry is a $20 Billion market, and has exploded exponentially in the past two decades. With the introduction of new forms of technology and lifestyle, the number of sleep disorders and sleeping problems have vastly expanded. This, along with unexceptional competition leaves room for pioneers to bridge these gaps and help the world sleep tight again.
Target Audience
Due to the scope of this project, we decided to target our first prototype at highschool/college students (ages 15-25). But ultimately iolight hopes to help all people who want better sleep habits, including students, workers, people with sleeping disorders, people with mental incapacities, people with depression.
*Sleep Graphic Provided By Vecteezy*
USER RESEARCH
After narrowing our target audience, we were able to more easily test to see if our idea would attract students, particularly the Georgia Tech students on campus. Willing Georgia Tech students were given oral-surveys to gather data on their sleep habits. We asked questions like the following:
- Describe the process of your sleep routine, from the moment you decide to fall asleep to the moment you get up.
- How long does it take you to fall asleep?
- How do you feel waking up in the morning?
- How many hours of sleep do you get every night? Is it enough sleep?
- Do you know if you have any known sleep disorders? If so, what?
“I WANT TO FALL ASLEEP FASTER”
As expected, we were not the only ones that would lay awake at night restless counting the number of hours wasted from not being able to fall asleep.
“I WANT TO WAKE-UP FEELING REFRESHED”
While not surprising, the majority of the users mentioned even after sleeping for hours, they woke up feeling groggy and smashing the snooze button.
“I WANT TO SEE MY SLEEP NUMBERS”
People really enjoy seeing visible progress. When we brought up the idea of being able to see their sleep statistics and see their sleep improve, many users agreed that it was a functionality that would definitely be helpful.
SLEEP RESEARCH
Then began the research for our actual product. Along with extensive web searching, we read through research papers, as well as asked neurologist and sleep experts for additional sleep information. After organizing our research we narrowed down the potential sleep concepts we wanted to implement in our product.
BRAINSTORMING SOLUTIONS
With the research and user in mind, we began coming up with ideas for how we wanted to solve the sleep problem. While we had plenty of ideas (i.e. Sonic Sleep Device placed near the user or Dawn Simulation and White noise device to install in the room), we decided we wanted to try to do something unique from the current sleep device market. We wanted to create a sleep mask that could include all 3 sleep concepts: Dawn Simulation, White Noise Stimulation, and tDCS
USER JOURNEY
And as we were wrapping up our initial research, we mapped out the user journey and kept it in mind throughout the entire design process, particularly to understand what interactions we needed to implement in our product. We wanted to make sure we understood the full user experience from getting ready for bed to waking up in the morning.
DESIGN
Mask Design Sketches
Taking inspiration for previously existing sleeping masks and VR headsets, we began sketching concepts for Iolight. The goal of this process was to come up with as many ideas as possible to later potentially prototype and test the ideas.
During our process of sketching the ideas, we continued to do user research to find out which mask seemed most comfortable to them. We discovered that comfort is quite subjective, as it’s difficult to appease everyone. However, we worked to create a design we felt would accommodate most users, and decided iterate on the design as we developed the product.
App USER FLOW
App Design Sketches
As we are developing the actual mask prototype, we also kept the application that would control the mask in mind.
APP DESIGN MOCKUP
This prototype was created quickly to show the judges a quick idea of what the visual design may look like. The user would interact with the Iolight app to use the Iolight mask.
FUTURE PLANS
Currently, we are still in the process of developing the sleep mask. Our biggest development challenge has been melding together comfort and functionality. And as with any project, fundraising and budget is always on our mind, as developing a product is not cheap!
We are continuing to do additional research and development and hope to be able to provide updates in the coming year!
Interested in more information about this project?
Redbubble
GRAPHIC DESIGN
What started as a hobby, I was able to turn into a small personal business on RedBubble. RedBubble is a company that allows freelance designers to upload their designs to merchandise. I then get a royalty off of any of the merchandise that is sold.
Most of my work on my RedBubble highlights my digital handlettering. I also do custom designs for some clients. All of my profits are donated to a non-profit orphanage in Vietnam.
Interested in more information about this project?
Kappa Alpha Theta
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Serving as the first Chief Marketing Officer of the charter member class of Kappa Alpha Theta at Georgia Tech, I worked to maintain Theta’s brand on and off campus. Here you can find all of my marketing materials I created to events, fundraisers, etc.