Display Automaton

I saved Macy’s $300,000 a year and improved the quality of work dramatically.

 

When I took my role at Macy’s there had already been established vendor relationships. Immediately it appeared to me that the vendor’s work was not best in class and had low quality control.

50-75% about of the work was being returned with design miss alignment from reference images and image compression issues.
The Macys the in-house dev team need to correct errors or recode the assets to match original design.

I advised we bring the work in house for look at alternate solutions such as adobe cc or vendors that specialize in scalable display solutions.

In the end it was decided by higher management Macy’s should build it’s own system from scratch.

I co-lead Dev and creative in a group effort to produce this system.

Creative developed a 4 layer set up photoshop that had quick command automation to export into an index file for dev team.

The dev team development a tool that minimize human time to export and recommend assets in to html and annimations.

I set up a module design and animation system with html 5 limitations in mind.

 

Type animations sample
We pick a few animation style for every 3 months to be templated.

People are attracted to things moving. In particular out of the corner of ones eye.
Type animation is a way to catch the attention of the potential target.

Image animations -
We pick a few animation style for every 3 months to be templated.
Animations are usually 15 sec. These are 6 sec samples.

Display and social stories are both 15 sec something to keep in mind.

 

In the end we saved $700,000 a year and improved the quality of work dramatically.

  1. Image compression was improved.

  2. Macy’s logo was made a svg to maintain crispness.

  3. Tagline copy is either live html or svg to maintain crispness.

  4. This increased team productivity to 70 to 120 individual display jobs a month.

Precovid I had a team of 6 designers and myself with a dedicated dev team.

Now it’s a team of 3 including me producing and no full time developers.
The creative team is continually looking to push display following social animation trends and good ui/ux trends.