Ian Fleming
Re-imagining the literacy legacy behind James Bond
Ian Fleming Publications Ltd and The Ian Fleming Estate work together to protect and uphold the legacy of Ian Fleming and his writing. Their aim is to promote and make available all of Ian Fleming’s books worldwide.
Ian Fleming Publications looks after the literary James Bond brand, keeping it alive through the publication of new stories by authors such as Anthony Horowitz, William Boyd, Jeffery Deaver, Sebastian Faulks, Steve Cole and Charlie Higson.
Client
Ian Fleming Publications
Project length
4 months
Platform
Desktop & Mobile
Agency | Wolfcub Digital
My Role: Workshop Facilitation, UX/ UI Design & Research
The Purpose
The Ian Fleming estate was looking to reinvent the online world of the writer’s literary legacy. Their website at the time was over five years old, not optimised for mobile, and looked and felt dated. It also hosted an excessive amount of content that made for a poor user experience.
The Challenges
With a legacy as huge as Ian Fleming’s, the main challenge faced was refining and migrating a vast amount of content into a new responsive platform that would do the content justice.
Alongside information on the many titles Fleming penned himself, it was also part of the task to create a structure that allowed the estate to showcase continuation books from new authors.
The final challenge was to integrate a shopping platform within the site that allowed visitors to discover the
Fleming merchandise.
Discovery
In order to tackle the brief, it was necessary to become totally immersed in the exciting world of Ian Fleming. That way we would not only have a better understanding of the man behind the books but also have a better understanding of what was required of us from the estate.
As with most projects, our framework was very much aligned to that of the Design Council's double diamond, meaning that we kicked things off with discovery before embarking on any of the finer details. In this case, we started with a strategy workshop to gain a better understanding of their business objectives, find out more about their target audience, any existing competition and what features they wanted to keep or change.
We then moved onto desk research which consisted of a content and site audit, a deep dive into their current analytics, a look into competitor analysis and of course a history lesson on Fleming himself!
Define
This stage of the project involves user testing. We worked with a select group of members of the estate and their target audience to identify how they felt about the existing website and brand as well as help to validate any early assumptions or initial ideas the team had.
The insights gathered helped us to map out the information architecture and start to focus on the key user journeys. From this came a set of wireframes which were then turned into an interactive prototype to test with real users.
Develop
Having built a newly tested and refined prototype, it was now time to focus on refining the visual language. It was important to us and the estate that we created something that truly represented the author’s personality and the characters he created.
This also took the form of a visual toolkit which guided the
design journey.
Deliver
By building a solid design foundation and user experience that was tailored to the Ian Fleming brand and the publisher’s audience, we were armed with the tools to create a beautiful and highly functional website that exceeded all expectations.
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Both the estate and Bond fans were extremely happy with the finished product that saw visitor engagement rocket by 150% as well as a boost in the sales of Ian Fleming books.