Paddington Central

Paddington Central is a vibrant, energetic public campus, beside the famous railway station. There is lots going on in and around Paddington Central, from grab-and-go lunches and after work drinks to evening dinners. 

Following the design of the recent Broadgate website, we were asked by British Land to re-skin the same platform for Paddington Central. Rather than design and build the entire site from scratch, we worked with the existing CMS, database and page structure to create a new set of page templates that gave the site a completely new look and feel.

We delivered

Brand vision, Personas, UX, Interaction design

Atomic Design

Atomic Design is methodology for creating design systems. The design of our interfaces can be similarly related to chemistry and the components that make up all matter in our universe. In the way that atoms bond together to form molecules, which then combine into complex organisms thus forming all matter, the construction of design systems to build our interfaces follow a similar method. 

Atoms are our HTML tags such as an input or button, which aren’t too helpful on their own. Combining them together to form building blocks (molecules) for a template, which then become various pages initiate the beginnings of a website. 

User experience

The new website’s role was two-fold; to attract new, forward-thinking office tenants, and to present Paddington as a retail, dining and entertainment destination to members of the general public.

Personas

To fully cater for and understand the website’s different audiences, we began with an exercise to define a series of personas from which we could then establish their needs and requirements.

User Stories

The personas allowed us to develop detailed user stories covering all key tasks that the various audiences would want to achieve whilst visiting the site.

IA & Wireframes

Once the requirements for the site were clear, we created a sitemap and a series of high-fidelity wireframes, defining the layout and content structure for each page of the site.

Brand vision

Like Broadgate, the role of Paddington Central is to increase footfall and dwell time of visitors to shops, bars and restaurants. It aims to create a sense of positive energy – a place that connects, empowers and surprises.

Interaction Design

We designed a responsive, vibrant, user friendly mobile menu. Whilst the old site was not mobile friendly, the new site templates were designed with mobile in-mind, and is fully responsive throughout.

Additionally we built in hover effects, and loading and scroll animations so that as users scroll down the pages, content is sequentially loaded on scroll both for impact and to make content easier for users to digest.

Interface Design

Finally, the wireframes were transformed into a responsive user interface design, bringing the site to life with the new branding and interactive, kinetic UI elements.

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