Tis’ the Skison
For an Interactive Catalog
When tasked with creating an interactive product catalog I was overwhelmed with the options. There are so many products I use and love but my husband (a skier) had the idea to create a catalog for Moment Skis. The Moment Ski Shop call themselves the “Biggest Little Ski Company in the World” and I love the design of their skis. Something I definitely wanted to capture was the “Wow Factor” website visitors get from their website graphics and artwork. I also wanted incorporate this idea of living in the moment like the company name communicates.
Though they also offer products like skins, bindings, and poles; I decided to focus on their freestyle collection skis.
For my initial planning I first thought about my audience. I wanted to appeal to skiers of all ages, but more specifically adventurous skiers that appreciate quality ski equipment. I imagined a skier like this would want reviews of the product front and center. They would also probably appreciate video clips of the skis being used and easy to find info about the construction and dimensions of the skis. Knowing I wanted to include these elements, I began my rough sketching.
Right away my design felt boring and stagnant with boxes, squares, pictures and scrolling. I decided to take things in a different direction with a more traditional catalog flow and feel with a cover and pages the user can navigate to and from. I got the idea from on online boat catalog actually. I thought the way it was designed was a cool digital adaption of the traditional catalog.
When it came to immersive elements I definitely wanted the landing page or “cover” to be mesmerizing and get the user to want to explore the rest of the catalog. I decided to use an auto-start video in place of a big hero image. I felt this gave the customer a chance to see the product in use and and make the customer feel like they were living in the “moment” with the slow motion footage.
With the rest of the info on the cover page, the page now looks like this:
Feedback from my peers helped me realize that the product text was too light for adequate readability so I thickened the product section stroke.
The product pages can be accessed by tapping the product itself or tapping the hamburger menu for the full catalog. Feedback from a peer helped me realize that there would be value in making the “moment” logo in the right hand corner link to the cover for ease of navigation so I added that feature as well.
The product page gives brief customer reviews as well as a little paragraph about the product. When selected, the ski size gets an additional box to let the customer know which size is being viewed. I matched the page gradient to the ski colors of each ski.
The construction page gives customers all the necessary information about the construction and build of the skis. I broke up the text into mini paragraphs so this page didn’t feel too text heavy and I think it does a good job of displaying all the info. The dimensions page was a little tricky because it was essentially just a table with ski measurements (see below).
To make things slightly more immersive and visually interesting I decided to add a video in the background of this page as well. The visibility of the table increases with the splash of fresh powder from the video and makes a boring old table a little less boring.
Overall I feel this catalog is both informative and immersive. It gives the customer all of the necessary information about the product while still being visually engaging and easy to navigate. By taking a different approach than I normally would, I explored elements I normally wouldn’t have. I learned that thinking outside the box or “norm” of design can prove very rewarding and make for a more engaging and aesthetically pleasing outcome.
