Take It To The Park Digital Experience Design
Opportunity
POSSIBLE managed the digital experience for Live Positively, the Coca-Cola Company’s corporate social responsibility initiative. One of many investments the company made each year was to award a grant to a public park to use for improvements.
From the earliest conversations with the client, we set out to evolve what had been a simple contest with a prize awarded to the park that achieves the most votes into a program that also encouraged and rewarded physical activity and spending time outdoors. This direction aligned with a broader Coca-Cola Corporation brand strategy to be more associated with physical activity and wellness. There was a particular push during the year that my agency won the Live Positively work to transform the parks program into a more direct response to some of the PR hits Coke was struggling with due to health concerns about soda, by representing and creating buzz around investments they were making in promoting healthy living.
Our "Take it to the Park" concept centered around integrating a popular fitness tracking program and FourSquare (remember FourSquare?) into the voting system, allowing park visitors to earn extra points for their park by spending time there, and multiply their votes by logging physical activity using the Map My Fitness app.
Given that the program was focused on getting people on the move and outdoors, a great mobile experience to participate on the fly was also a fundamental objective.
Process
With a tight timelines and a large group of stakeholders (internal and outside vendors), we moved quickly into high-fidelity comps to gain consensus and buy-in on a vdirection and look-and-feel for the digital experience. I used sketch-level wireframes at this stage to quickly help to define the concept. As a team, we were able to quickly iterate through our initial ideas and establish a basic approach and functionality, allowing us to identify and start to bring technical partners on board and for me to get an art director and team of two designers to move quickly into establishing visual design direction.
Key to our direction was a light-hearted look and feel, tying in with the Coca-Cola brand and the nostalgia of childhood days spent playing outside at your neighborhood park, and to find engaging ways to make the objective of encouraging outdoor activity and park usage a fundamental part of the contest.
The program resulted in over 359 million impressions, 1.5 million votes, and over 72,000 total hours of logged activity. The voting system based on gaming best practices reduced the problems with “cheating” and gaming the system that had plagued previous years.
Here’s a nice little case study POSSIBLE put together telling the story of the park that won: https://www.possible.com/work/coca-cola-parks
Work
Early sketch-level wireframes used to move through some initial iterations when establishing our concept and approach:
Sketching out basic user flows and technical touchpoints.
More formalized user flow diagrams used to facilitate discussions with internal, client, and third-party development partners. One of our first tasks was to reach out to and establish a partnership with the third parties whose API's we wanted to integrate into the Take it to the Park voting system and to evaluate their capabilities. To facilitate discussions with our internal developers, Coca-Cola’s IT group, and the third-parties , I created flow diagrams that documented how we wished them to work with our digital experience, to kick off the technical discussions on feasibility and brainstorm solutions. These documents were updated throughout the process to reflect UI and technical requirements.
Detailed wireframes…given that the point of the program was to get people out into their local parks, a seamless and engaging mobile experience was critical to success.
Detailed wires to define the mobile and desktop experience. The interface where participants found and voted for their local park pulled from state and national parks databases (who partnered with Coca-Cola on the program) as well as our third-party partners, so was a complex integration challenge that had to feel easy and intuitive to the user.
The final design.
This dashboard provided a visualization of contest data to create a bit of urgency and motivate with a sense of competition—a fun snapshot of activity across the U.S.
Take It To The Park
Client
The Coca-Cola Company
My Roles:
Creative team leadership
Concepting
Design Strategy
User Path Analysis
Information Architecture
Wireframing
Functional Documentation