WhyMetalPackaging.com
Fighting for a real-recycling society
Have you ever noticed that almost all products we buy in the supermarket are already packaged for us? Every week we carry out bottles of water, packs of milk, cans filled with vegetables, bottles of shampoo, …
When these products reach the end of their useful life, we collect and recycle them. And while that’s a good thing, only metal can be recycled forever, with no loss of quality and properties. In the packaging industry this is known as real recycling.
In order to grow a real-recycling society, Empac (European Metal Packaging) educates and promotes metal packaging to more than 200 manufacturers, suppliers and national associations.
By helping Empac reaching out to it’s community, Little Miss Robot became a proud partner contributing to a more social, environmental and economic supply chain.
Learn & Explore
We started this project with hosting several workshops, learning all about Empac, the packaging industry and the benefits of metal.
We facilitated the process of moving away from tons of messages and statements to a very focussed and well thought-out key topic. We learned that Empac was informing and educating members, while their actual target was convincing decision makers.
We did not create anything tangible during the first workshops with Little Miss Robot. But what I finally saw was truly amazing.
— Ellen Wauters, Manager Communications
We decided to change the communication strategy from informing the what to explaining the why. It became the very core of the platform we are building together: WhyMetalPackaging.com.
Design & Build
After the Exploration Phase we started sketching and prioritizing user stories, made a production roadmap and aligned a team of 1 Product Manager, 1 Product Designer and 2 Product Developers.
Designing The Message
We ran several iterations visualizing and fine tuning the core message for WhyMetalPackaging. You no longer have to be a packaging expert to understand why metal is a material worth considering. Let us walk you through it.
Building The Platform
Given the diversity of our target audience (going from single users to large associations), we felt the need to support both modern and legacy browsers. We have put a lot of effort in making the site perform great on Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer (back to IE6!).
We used the Graceful Degradation design principle to ensure that the message was always primary to anything fancy that could break the experience on legacy browsers.
We wanted to enrich the experience on modern browsers by using UI animations revealing the message gradually as you scroll along. We used http://scrollrevealjs.org as a backbone for all of our creative desires.
This open-source library by @JulianLloyd allows to define animations in human language, we loved it from the second it was published to Github. We even modified the source code here and there, adding extra animation possibilities on top.
Interpack 2014
After 4 months of design, development and user testing we were ready to ship WhyMetalPackaging.com’s first version. And what better opportunity to launch than being part of world’s biggest packaging conference: Interpack.
We worked closely together with Empac and their booth supplier to design interactive experiences in and around the stand, pushing our core message forward. With several touch tables we guided visitors through the benefits of metal packaging.
On top of that we created interactive artwork to boost the stand’s entry, inviting people to take a look around.
Disclaimer: At the moment of writing, we are designing a Phase 2 roadmap for WhyMetalPackaging. We are facilitating strategic meetings and inspiration workshops with stakeholders to become further and even better aligned globally. We are looking forward to keeping you posted.
