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Design@Symantec

Showing posts in English
A Walk-Through Of Our Iterative Design Process
Erin Eng | 02 May 2013 | 1 comment

Wireframes, mockups, style guides, technical analysis, and more! The design process can be quite daunting but knowing there are specific steps helps in managing the outcome and creating consistency throughout an entire website. The final designs you see on Symantec.com go through quite an extensive iterative process before making it onto the site. In this post, I’ll share the thinking behind a typical project and how each step adds to ensuring the end result works.

On larger projects, we typically go through a process which includes the following stages - gathering and understanding requirements, wireframing, usability testing, designing page comps, user acceptance testing, and launch. Visual Design, Project Management, Information Architecture, Development, Content, and Stakeholders all play key roles in ensuring the success of website launches.

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Study: Visual Cues Convey Security
Reshma Kumar | 02 May 2013 | 0 comments

Strategically placed seals indicating that a site is secure increase the perceived level of security on a site.

In a study on checkout usability, it was found that visual cues of security like the Norton Secured Seal help customers feel more confident in providing their credit card information online. The study found that positioning also mattered where seals placed next to credit card form fields on a payment page provided an uplift in the perceived level of security by customers.

The study concluded that while customers might not understand technical jargon such as SSL or...

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Design Considerations For Mobile
Vicky Peterson | 02 May 2013 | 0 comments

mobile app design image
In the last few years, consumers have enjoyed the amazing touch-screen technology on their mobile phones and tablets. The fantastic graphics are one of the biggest attractions to the new technology. Designing those graphics on the mobile canvas is no small feat though. There are many differences when designing for a mobile application versus for a desktop web experience.

SIZE
One very important difference when designing for a phone versus web - mobile phones are MUCH smaller than a web page. Most are as much as a tenth of the size so there has to be some serious consideration given to the content. Not only should the actual copy be reduced in volume, but the number of basic interactive elements that we take...

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Maximizing Visibility With An Auto-Rotating Carousel
Rich Lam | 02 May 2013 | 0 comments

When we initially launched the redesigned homepage, the hero banner area at the top of the page displayed only the first hero message by default. The banners didn’t rotate to the other messages and required users to manually mouseover the banner thumbnails to view the other three heros. As a result, we found that there was a missed opportunity to maximize the visibility of the other hero messages for users.
 
To address this issue, what we’ve done is transform the hero banners into an auto-rotating carousel which cycles through each of the four hero messages. With a subtle fade transition from one message to another, the hero now has the right amount of animation to draw users’ attention to these key messages without introducing visual noise. And, visitors now have a greater probability of viewing a banner message which was previously buried and likely increase the rate of user interaction.

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Value Of Using A Digital Asset System To Improve Design Efficiency
Reshma Kumar | 02 May 2013 | 0 comments

DAM LA ConferenceI will be speaking at the upcoming DAM LA Conference on digital asset management systems and the value of such a system.

One of the things my team does is create graphics, purchase stock imagery, and commission custom photography. We do this for many sites, domestically and globally, and for desktop and mobile. As a result, we amass vast amounts of graphical assets. The question then becomes how do you manage it? Do we have these assets sit disparately on designers' local harddrives or on a share drive?

What we have found to be valuable is to have a library or central repository to house, manage, and...

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Behind the Scenes At A Symantec Photo Shoot
Erin Eng | 02 May 2013 | 0 comments

We had an exciting opportunity to manage and Art Direct a two-day photo shoot this past week. The shoot included several locations around the Symantec Mountain View campus, and at a local residence. Our goal was to mimic natural settings - coffee shops, corporate offices, home offices - and interactions between the models.

Staging shot and adjusting lighting for outdoor scene

Based on the brand direction and what we wanted the photography to communicate, our team developed the shot list. We planned out each shot with a description of the scene, location of the shot, number of models in each scene, wardrobe the models would wear, and any props to be used. We selected versatile, multi-ethnic, and mixed gendered models to fit each scene we designed. And with the...

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About Symantec Makes An About-Face
Erin Eng | 02 May 2013 | 1 comment

We recently launched a redesign of the About Symantec section of our website. This redesign is part of the ongoing updates to the look and feel we’ve been rolling out across the rest of the site. The higher level focus of the redesign is to better align the site with the company's larger goals - to focus more on the customer, to meet the needs of our diverse user-base, and reinforce our branding of "Protecting People and Their Information". 

As you will see, the new About landing page is laid out in a very magazine-like style with lots of imagery interspersed with content leading you to the story of Symantec. The user interface treatments and imagery are very corporate and professional befitting the section it represents.

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Art of Web Design
Rich Lam | 02 May 2013 | 0 comments

Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Whitney Hess discuss the impact of design on the Web, and the transition from a desktop based medium to a mobile medium in recent years.

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New & Improved Cross-Site Navigation
Reshma Kumar | 02 May 2013 | 0 comments

Last week, we launched a cross-site navigation enhancement to the Symantec.com Enterprise site.

We’ve added links to each of our four main sites – i.e. Norton, Small & Medium Business, Enterprise, and Partners – across the top of the site thereby, creating a funnel effect readily exposing our site choices by default and enabling users to more easily navigate to the destination that best fits their needs.

We’ve also added a site identifier adjacent to the logo to help users better identify the site they are on i.e. Symantec | Enterprise. This, is in addition to bolding the link label of the site the user is on e.g. “Enterprise” in the site navigation bar at the top of the page.

Hope this helps to better cross-navigate our sites.

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New Adobe CS6 Features
Vicky Peterson | 02 May 2013 | 4 comments

There are some cool new features in Adobe CS6’s Photoshop worth noting. While these are not even half of the new improvements and additions to Photoshop, they are the ones that I see as most immediately beneficial.

  • Content-Aware Patch, Move & Extend – Allows for retouching of images with astonishing ease and control. This is very similar to the old rubber stamp tool, but it can automatically blend the patch into the surrounding area.
  • Mercury Graphics Engine – By directly taking advantage of our computer’s GPU, Photoshop CS6 delivers real-time feedback, allowing us to edit images at amazingly fast speeds.
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