HelloPlan Website

HelloPlan website
Wireframing, UX, Design and Development

HelloPlan is a website specialised in local deals, goods and getaways for the city of Barcelona. Recently launched, it is one of the most fascinating retail businesses due to their unique purchasing system.

Wireframing and UX

An e-commerce site is a complex project since the User Interface and the User Experience need to be perfect to succeed. For the User Interface I choose to have as fewer elements as possible and position every element in a way that would flow the user into his/her objective without creating any barriers and keeping the frustration level to zero.

Design and Development

Design

The design of the site was done with Adobe Fireworks CS5 and took less than a month. The website design was delivered with a Branding Document which specified every characteristic in the design (spacings, colour palettes, typography, style, positioning, boxes, image style, etc.) so that newer projects will keep the same look and feel and professionalism. I choose to use blue so that it contrasted with the logo. I also used colours to signify meanings. For example:

Front-end Development

Upon delivery I also got the role to develop the design into functional HTML/CSS using HTML5 and CSS3 functionalities where possible adapting a Progressive Degradation methodology. The client wanted the website to load in older browsers such as IE6, IE7 and IE8 so I developed the website for these browsers too.

HelloPlan's loads great on mobile devices too and a Responsive Design will be coming soon in the next few months.

Back-end Development

Although the website was built in Wordpress which is quite easy to do, the company wanted an independent login system for the users so I developed a Wordpress plugin that registered users into a parallel database and could also allow the profile to be flexible, allowing them to add and remove user fields.

Another part of the back-end development was developing the whole system and integrating it with a Payment Gateway. To do this I developed another Wordpress plugin with a proprietary API that would connect through several methods (cURL, JSON, AJAX) to the Banking System.