Sky / Responsive Web Guidelines

Video: Sky.com Goes Responsive

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

As a mobile web expert at Sky, I was asked to help reshape Sky.com, Sky News, and Sky Sports to become responsively designed websites. I created a global guideline that accomplished two main goals. The first goal was to responsively design the site foundation and interaction patterns so that they worked fluidly across any computer or device. The second goal was to create consistency across all Sky properties. Sky is a large company with many different stakeholders, designers, and developers. Because there were no interaction guidelines, each team had its own way of building components of the site. A guideline was crucial in creating a new responsive site with a consistent experience across company channels. Along with these goals, I focused on customer usability and creating solutions that would be easy for developers to implement across departments.

My work on this project included problem solving, wireframing, defining patterns, consulting with development teams, and giving guidance to designers who had never designed for mobile devices. I worked with visual designers to help flesh out the foundation that I created. The document was then shared with the design and development teams to use as they designed the new responsive site. The document included guidelines on the following subjects: designing for mobile; universal grid; masthead and footer; Sky logo; iconography and graphics; fonts; colors; online forms; responsive advertising; image sizing and carousels; video delivery and video player; buttons and links; touch gestures; and navigation.

PROJECT TEAM:  Rob Leotta, UX Manager  /  Bruno Molena, Sr. Visual Designer  /  Christine Cabansag, Project Manager

ABOUT THE CLIENT

BSkyB is also known as British Sky Broadcasting, or simply Sky. They are located in the greater London area. Although most Americans are unfamiliar with the company, Sky is one of the UK’s most well known brands. They are a broadcasting, broadband, and telephone company with over 10 million customers. They own Sky News, Sky Sports, and several of their own TV stations. To compare them to a US company, they are like Comcast, ESPN, HBO, and CNN, all in one. They have several mobile applications that are consistently within the top downloads in the UK, alongside Facebook and Skype. SkyCreative is one of the largest creative groups in Europe, and Sky aims to be the largest technology company in the UK.