Timberland.com/customboots

Timberland has granted its website visitors the ability to manufacture customized boots for quite some time. But sales were lagging and customer conversion was low. The original design was executed in Javascript and used server-side image rendering system was slow, unresponsive, and used standard browser form controls that conveyed no brand consistency with where Timberland was going. Fluid, Inc. was asked to evaluate building a better boot builder.

We opted for Flash because thick-client technologies allow for truly immediate interaction design, and because there would be almost no client-side, cross-browser testing needed of a Flash application. We also had a number of key innovation we wanted to introduce:

• Deeply styled interface controls
• Product views zoomable to twice the size of the competition
• Product rotation (most competitors had fixed single views)
• Develop a more explanatory, guiding interface
• Flexible administrative tools
• Product views zoomable to twice the size of the competition
• Provide meaningful starting points and streamlined completion paths for novice or design-averse users
• Cross-sell non-customizable products on the way to the shopping cart that are based on what parameters the user configured on their boot

Fluid, Inc.'s engineers, with my input and imaging advice, created a runtime tinting engine that facilitated much all of the colorization effects without requiring discrete assets per piece, per color. Standard programming design patterns and object-oriented principles allowed the data model of products, components, and attributes to be not only applicable to a variety of products, but also to exactly match the structure of each of the product view objects shown to the user.

Quarterly orders expected expectations immediately, and customer conversion nearly tripled over the previous version of the configurator in the first two quarters since our redesign went live.

This project, and a similar project for Reebok, was featured in a talk I gave at the FlashForward 2006 conference (to a healthy 87% approval rating, thanks, folks!).

I acted as the visual designer, animator, and production director. I supervised and technically directed all photography, post-production, and asset cutting.