The Client

Dow is an American multinational chemical corporation; a manufacturer of plastics, chemicals, and agricultural products.

The Brief

Under the theme of "Inspiring Innovation", DOW needed to create an engaging experience in the National Plastics Expo (NPE) 2015 to showcase their broad range of materials and solutions across 19+ different markets, with the goal of capturing interest and driving sales leads. 

Audience

NPE event attendees who may be in the plastics industry with the prospect of doing business with Dow.

Solution

• Created an augmented reality (AR) experience for the entrance of the Dow product showcase to draw attendee interest to explore the rest of the area.

• Designed and developed an interactive touch table experience that showcased a range of Dow solutions. The experience integrated with a barcode scanner to allow attendees to request follow-ups from Dow with a scan of their NPE badge.

• The bar code scanner also integrated with over 30 sample cards placed throughout the Dow product showcase, which enabled attendees to scan a card to be taken directly to a product detail screen.

• Clarified and organized Dow’s product hierarchy to ensure what is complicated is displayed to the user as simple and intuitive.

Client: 
Dow

Business Model: 
B2B

Team:
  •  UX – Jess Chow
  •  Visual Design – Matt Nagy
•  App Dev – Nick Hubben, Rob Brecher
  •  Production – Andrea Palumbo
  •  Account – Josh Hoekwater

UX Deliverables:
  •  User Flow
  •  Wireframes

User Flow

In order to capture attendees’ attention as they were walking through the expo, we created a “gallery walk” experience. This experience displayed a live mirrored view of attendees as they walked up to the screen, and utilized augmented reality to map thought bubbles above their heads. These thought bubbles posed both serious questions and fun facts about topics such as the environment and sustainability in order to prompt the attendee to enter the product showcase to find out the answer.

I worked closely together with the experiential app developer to ensure this vision could come to life. I created a user flow that not only more clearly articulated our vision, but also helped us identify gaps, uncover details, and account for edge cases.

Working and Brainstorm Sessions

This project was an inter-agency effort between Genuine and Jack Morton, where Jack Morton executed on the event (physical) side while Genuine worked on the digital side. It required close collaboration between these two teams in order to ensure a seamlessly integrated and holistic experience.

After several working sessions with the Dow and Jack Morton teams, we came up with tactical creative solutions that addressed business and user needs.

There were two main problems that my wireframes had to address:

• Dow’s product hierarchy is 4 levels deep, and the touch table experience needed to allow users to easily dive into the deepest level to learn about specific product details.

• Ensure a way of information capture for lead generation purposes.

Wireframe & Visual Design

Through wireframes and visual design, we helped simplify and define the attendees’ experience:

• A product detail screen included information on a product family, and selecting a product in this section would display an overlay. Attendees therefore could easily navigate through all products within a family without leaving the screen.

• We introduced a color system along with clear labels to indicate what submarket the product family is under. All product families within the same submarket are demarcated with the same color (e.g. “Pouch Packaging” and “Appliances” are both product families within the “Consumer & Household Goods” submarket and were marked orange in design.)

• Overarching categories, called megatrends internally to Dow, were also demarcated on the page, but with lower visual hierarchy as pure supporting information.

• Attendees could request for product information on the product detail screen, choose the products they were interested in and scan their badge. This enabled Dow to capture attendee info such as email address, so the sales team could follow-up with them.

Day 1 Results

There were over 200 product sample scans and roughly the same number of email requests across 55 different companies after the first day of the event.

Dow was able to use these analytics in near real-time, providing the list of interested attendees to an executive to schedule and personalize in-depth product discussions. Leveraging this data allowed our client to demonstrate real, tangible ROI immediately.