Jennifer Kilan

Litle bit about “Frog”. Industrial design company recently a digital design company.

Today talking about “Form Follows Function” we’ve adopted to “Form Follows Emotion”.

Form Follows Function - made famous by a sculpture. Really important when designing objects, with single focus. Three key areas for wayfinding. Landmarks, routes, maps.

“Form Follows Function”

Landmarks - photo of golden “Landmarks are distinctive and should be easily viewable from a distance”

Routes “Routes are abstract and point to point, with the journey internalized and not easily communicable.”

Maps “Maps reveal overall spatial orientation and the general relationships of one place to another.”

“Form Follows Emotion”

Being a Harley owner is all about the entire experience. You not just going somewhere, it’s the journey.

Merian Scout Case Study

This is what I want to share with you today.

Merian is a European brand making tour guides and maazines providing prmium content. They wanted to create a GPS that did the same thing. They came to frog and we talked to them about “form follows emotion”.

We wanted the user to not only be able to program their journey but have the story unfold along the way.

Showing a button that will give you alternatives in the case of needing a plan B, showing you nearby alternatives.

Umbrella icon is a tour guide. Allows the user to feel like they have a trusted advisor. Also allows for mult-faceted search parameters to be used.

Emotional connections - large sense of making memories, photo, how important those are. Saved and suggested images can prompt ideas for a new route.

Wanted to think about personalisation for end-users. “The packaging reflects that sense of the experience being about your trip and your happines.” Tries to detect what user likes and suggest relavent things in the future(?)

Physical design - similar size to a blackberry. Shiny, blue highlights. Make the user feel that this product is something to be trusted. Something to provide a rich experience.

Product launched last year in Germany and won a “red dot” award. frog worked on software design as well as the packaging.

Looking at design of interface. Leveraging as much imagery as possible. Photos. Also nice UI touches. Showing nearby things and the direction and distance of them to give you the chance to flit about and see other things. Make sure there’s a sense of exploration and the user can get cues from the physical world and the POIs.

Merian Case Study

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