Since late 2012, Edelman and I have advocated for and began implemention of a mobile-first responsive UX design strategy for HP.
HP Next
My first brief for HP was to design a blog. But it couldn't simply be a blog. It needed to be more. This blog was going to be the central global hub for external communication for HP's turnaround plan led by CEO Meg Whitman. The team at Edelman had put together some solid concepts against the brief but asked me to take a look.
Rather that look at the comps through the lens of art director or usability expert, I took a step back to examine them through the eye of a creative director. Who is HP? How are they currently perceived? What is the enduring truth about HP that we needed to express through this user experience? This initiative was too important to the future of the company to be satisfied with assumptions and preliminary thinking.
What I found was that HP was traditionally viewed as an inward looking cormpany by analysts, partner companies and consumers alike. The Fiorina era had left the company unfocused and innovation suffered. They were late the tablet game. Investors were not impressed.
However, under Meg Whitman, HP rededicated themselves to four pllars: 1) empowering our people; 2) advancing innovative products; 3) strengthening our fiscal performance; and 4) making it matter. Each of these pillars needed to be addressed - not simply through word and image but though user experience. It is not simply enough to say that we are something. We need to be something.
So rather than create a traditional desktop blogging experience, we created a responsive news magazine experience. The concept was to provide a highly visual "lean back" experience that lets analysts, shareholders, and members of the media to access up-to-the-minute data and informaiton about HP's progress in implementing and executing the turnaround strategy whenever and wherever they chose. We pushed hard to create an experience that delivers on HP's newly minted brand promise to "Make technology for for you."
From a brand perspective, we needed to make sure that our interface spoke in the HP voice: courageous, personal and bright. In articulation of the core brand ethos, we worked to expand the core HP Experience platform responsively onto mobile platforms.
HP News Now
Based on our success on HP next, we were asked to develop a responsive redesign for the internal facing communications hub as well. We pulled the visual style back a notch to place it more in line with the published HP standards while expanding the global visual architecture to include a more potent typographic hierarchy, a wider range of functional visual treatments and a library of mobile UX patterns.
