Pollen

Designing for needs

By identifying and understanding the variety of users, we were able to design key journeys that met their needs as they research and navigate the complex process of finding a home loan and connecting with the right broker. Within our design process we ensured the business goals were met; to refresh the site’s look and feel, optimise page performance, and design the right content and tools to promote new customer acquisition and conversions.

The website was integral to reaching a conversion rate of 93% for new leads.

As we moved through the redesign process we also identified there was an opportunity to uplift the brand, especially as Mortgage Choice were about to launch a new Financial Planning service, which could be tied into this brand update.

Invigorating the brand and introducing a new financial service under the parent company provided an opportunity for Mortgage Choice to connect and drive consideration with a younger audience.

Since 1992, Canstar (and subsequently Canstar Blue) have been helping Aussies make the right decision before parting with their hard-earned cash. As one of the most trusted brands and biggest financial comparison platforms in this country, we were chuffed when they trusted us to help them evolve the customer experience for their comparison products.

A relationship built on trust

Canstar's ability to simplify the complex world of things like home loans, health insurance, electricity and even mobile plans has seen them become one of Australia's fastest-growing digital businesses, with a staggering 1 in 6 Australians visiting their sites last year.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney is Australia’s leading museum dedicated to exhibiting, collecting and interpreting the work of today’s artists.

Our brief was to make contemporary art and ideas accessible to all online audiences.

But where do you start with such an broad brief? Like all our engagements, we started with a conversation. A structured conversation in the form of a Project Context workshop, where as a team we interrogate and document our initial understanding, then involve our clients to gain clarity on additional considerations and unknowns so that the project is well informed at the outset.

Armed with a greater understanding of the museum’s vision and desires, we developed a rich appreciation for the diversity of audiences and stakeholders that our response needed to consider.

In order to gain stakeholder support for the project, we defined a vision and strategic direction

This vision demonstrated our approach towards branding, accessibility, architecture and the handling of the many and varied artworks the site would need to display. This gave everyone involved clarity and confidence on where we were heading.

In a series of engaging, participatory co-design workshops we collaborated with MCA staff and artists advisory groups to develop the key concepts for the site.

While the NSW Government had a comprehensive set of digital brand guidelines, there were substantial inconsistencies in how these guidelines were being applied across the various Government Department websites.

To address this problem, the Department of Customer Service enlisted Pollen to help create an overarching Design System to normalise design consistency across NSW.Gov sites, to accelerate project delivery, and uplift the quality of digital outputs.

Consistency through an inclusive design system

The Design System needed to be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant to accommodate the widest possible audience needs and be flexible to be applied across the various departments and initiatives within the NSW government ecosystem.

Working closely with the user experience and design teams within the NSW Government, we conducted a department-wide audit to collate the required patterns for the design system. Using the new NSW Digital Design Guidelines as the foundation, we set about designing the various patterns including main navigation, feature headers, new article cards, sidebar navigation and more.

Pollen prides itself on taking a user centred design approach and it’s something we really advocate for with our clients. As this approach becomes more widely known, clients can sometimes come to us with the user's needs front and centre.

Audience first and foremost

We were thrilled when Deaf Children Australia approached us with this idea as the foundation of their brief. Their eventual goal is to build a highly valuable online resource for parents of deaf or hard of hearing children. However, with so many different needs within this community, they wanted to get this audience’s input first and foremost. The project was to be in three stages: an initial ‘survey’ site where people could answer questions and talk about their experiences, time to synthesise this information, and further interrogate through focus groups, which would then inform the content and functionality of the final site.

As nice as they are to receive, traditional plastic gift cards are a bit frustrating

Often forgotten or remain unused in the bottom of a drawer. They’re bulky to carry around, they expire and you can’t check the balance. It’s a pretty bad experience as a consumer and somewhat surprisingly it’s also a poor experience for the retailer as they miss out on the additional incremental sales that a gift card typically generates — up to 140% of the face value of the gift card.

So when we were approached by an enterprising couple who had a start up idea, that actually solved all these problems, they had our attention.

They had already established the brand, Prezzee, though required Pollen to architect, design and develop the core platform, website and iOS application.

The Prezzee vision was that they provide users with a digital wallet that can be filled with gift cards from Australia’s most recognised brands. These gift cards can be purchased for yourself or you could send and receive gifts with designed greeting cards in a single unified purchase and gifting experience.

The diversity of retailers offering e-giftcards in Australia is matched only by the diversity in the ways they sell them. So, in order to create a simple and beautiful customer experience, Prezzee needed to support as many of these platforms as possible.

Typically these large brands’ entire gift card operations are owned by a few ‘aggregators’, they run the end-to-end solution for the brands. So it was these aggregators that we need to establish a robust technical integration with.

Pollen designed and developed a distributed service based architecture using Django and other Python frameworks to capture the core parts of Prezzee, from inventory management, order management and notifications to customer onboarding. As each new retailer is brought on board, it is integrated into Prezzee by mapping their capabilities to Prezzee’s platform via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).