WONDR were guest speakers on the latest video series by Velocitize Magazine.

In the latest episode of Velocitize Talks, our very own Peter Delaney (Director of Product & Technology – WONDR) shares his thoughts on emerging trends in fintech, blockchain and e-commerce.

Velocitize Talks is an award-winning video series featuring agency innovators, digital disruptors and marketing leaders from around the world. The publication is delivered by WP Engine to provide insights into the shifting trends and innovative technologies defining digital marketing today.

Peter also joined an expert industry panel at WP Engine’s Ignite event in London to share his experience building cutting edge digital products on the world’s most trusted enterprise WordPress platform.

WONDR have been listed in the Top 10 Global Agencies at this year’s Vega Digital Awards 2022.

One the main award programme concludes, the Vega Digital Awards select the top ten participating agencies for the honours of being listed in the ‘Top 10 Global Agencies‘.

Selection is based on the number of categories won, the quality of entries and the company’s wider profile. To be listed in the ten agencies listing you have to deliver excellence through your creativity, strategy and expertise.

The Top 10 Global Agency listing is further recognition for WONDR and follows on from our 4 wins at this year’s programme.

This year we collected awards for

• Best Energy Website
• Best Financial Services App
• Best Insurance Website
• Best Services / Utilities App.

It is the second year in a row that WONDR have won 4 awards at the Vega Digital Awards for clients across banking, fintech, eCommerce, web 3 & insurance sectors.

Dermot further added…

“We are grateful for this recognition as it concludes a hugely successful year for us where we collected 22 awards in 12 months. Our award wins were from some of the world’s most prestigious programmes such as the Webby’s & UX Design Awards. We were also recognised at home at the Spiders, Digital Business Ireland Awards & the Digital Media Awards.”

About the Vega Awards
The Vega Digital Awards highlight the vital role of digital pioneers in an ever-changing digital landscape.

Organised by the International Awards Association (IAA), this year’s programme had over 1,000 submissions from 20 countries, clearly demonstrating the influence and reach the awards has in its mission of honouring excellence in the digital industry.

The judging panel was comprised of 22 industry experts from 10 countries around the globe.

WONDR joined an expert industry panel to share our views on accelerating innovation at WP Engine’s Ignite event in London.

WP Engine welcomed top agencies and brands at the Londoner Hotel to showcase new product features and more specifically to discuss the possibilities of building cutting edge digital products on WP Engine, the world’s most trusted enterprise WordPress platform.

As part of the expert panel we shared insights on how our process has enabled brands such as 11Onze & Irish Heart Foundation to achieve incredible business results as well as being recognised for digital excellence by award programmes across the globe.

WONDR was represented by Director of Product, Peter Delaney, who also shared insights on how we have delivered headless solutions for clients and the opportunities and challenges this has brought. WONDR has developed a design led development process that enables brands to fast track digital transformation programmes.

At the event WONDR were also invited by WP Engine’s Velocitize Magazine to film video interviews sharing our predictions on the future of the industry, digital wallets & of course wordpress.

WP Engine  x  WONDR

WONDR is a trusted partner of WP Engine, the world’s most trusted enterprise WordPress platform that delivers stability, performance & security.

Over 1.5 million sites are now powered by WP Engine with approx 8% of all web users passing through a site using the platform.

Our recent work for 11Onze & Irish Heart Foundation have both been benchmarked by WP Engine as examples of global digital excellence on the platform.

As part of Design Week 2022, the Institute of Designers Ireland with support from the Design Crafts Council of Ireland have opened the IDI ReJOYce Exhibition to celebrate the best of Irish Design over the past 50 years.

The exhibition aims to showcase the depth of creativity and far reaching impact that the Irish design industry delivers to businesses across the globe.

A stat highlighted by Minister Humphreys from a Grant Thornton report which commissioned by the Design & Crafts Council Ireland, highlights a turnover of €53 billion across design & craft in the Irish economy.

The exhibition was opened at Two Central Plaza, Dame Street with a speech by the Minister for Social Protection of Ireland, Heather Humphreys. The exhibition plans to raise the profile of Irish design to the general public and will run from the 16th November until 2nd December 2022.

WONDR are featured in the digital design section of the exhibition with our work for clients from across home and abroad which include, 11Onze ‘La Plaça’ (Spain), Likha Aesthetic Clinic (Ireland) and CSSDA WOTY (global).

IDI 50 years on

The exhibition marks the 50th Anniversary of the IDI, who were established in 1972 by a group of passionate designers led by architect Raymond McGrath, who created a community where designers could support each other and encourage development of the design profession.

50 years on, navigating economic highs and lows, that profession is valued at €6bn and the IDI has continued to support designers and their businesses every step of the way.

Held in the unique Drury Buildings, we hosted our first of a series of events called the Get-Together with WONDR.

The Get-together was an opportunity for our client partners, the WONDR team and friends of the business to ditch the zoom calls for an afternoon and meet face-to-face over drinks & canapés.

It was a welcome opportunity to get to know ‘the faces’ behind the screen and celebrate our recent award wins together.

It’s been a very successful year as we’ve collected 22 awards from some of the world’s most prestigious design award programmes.

Thank you to everyone who attended, the room was full of smiles and the conversations were flowing throughout.

Our next get-together will be better than ever so if you missed this one, make sure to mark your calendar for the next one.

Here are a collection of shots from the event 👇🏾

Every year Awwwards hold a conference in an iconic city to bring the global design community together with inspirational talks on trends, new technologies and provocative thoughts to create discussion.

Over two days we heard from designers, developers and digital experts from across the globe who gave fascinating insights on what’s happening next, here are our key takeouts from the event.

Nothing quite compares to the impact of well crafted 3D experience, be that through video or WebGL. Paired with great content and presented with compelling motion design, 3D has the power to cut through and create genuinely engaging digital experiences. But, they come at a cost.

The additional processing power to serve and run such experiences is coupled with a greater awareness that 3D and motion design are inherently less accessible.

In the same way packaging designers have evolved to consider environmental and user impact, so too should digital designers when considering what creative tools to employ and deploy.

At the same time digital designers are finding access to 3D software, motion graphics and webGL (through ThreeJS etc) is becoming easier and more ‘designer’ friendly. In addition, the spectre of the meta-verse is driving us towards more, not less 3D.

In other words, these forbidden fruits are increasingly reachable. Their demand also seems to be increasing. But just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. As always, the experiences we create must serve the brand and the message, not the latest fad or tools we have to hand.

Motion is something that can have a phenomenal impact on any website, creating focus around key areas, not only making it more interactive for the user but giving the brand life and personality to evoke positive emotion.

We like to use motion to draw users attention & provide feedback on their progress where possible, but it’s critical to ensure motion never hinders functionality but adds to the user experience.

Likha Aesthetic Clinic uses subtle motion design to build empathy with the user. This site has been benchmarked by Awwwards for mobile excellence, due to the fact whilst we had used motion design to enhance the experience, it did not affect performance on mobile devices.

Helping users think and feel by finding the balance between science and art is a topic from the event that really stood out to us as well, as it is something that we are passionate about.

We like combining science, data and creativity to create digital products that deliver for both users and brands alike.

A recent example of this was for the 11Onze El Canut App, where we utilised the latest in artificial intelligence to predict user behaviour on our proposed designs for the launch. We then correlated this data against the results of real user testing with over 1,200 people to validate, refine and ensure we had the right user experience that would deliver for everyone.

11Onze were a good example of a brand willing to be brave, as we released openly via the user test what we were going to launch into the market. We weren’t worried by the competition nor were we afraid to hear what customers would think, in fact we welcomed it and took onboard their feedback to deliver something they wanted.

Do the Unexpected

One of the key themes that really struck a chord with us was being brave by ‘Doing something unexpected’.

We strongly agree with this sentiment and why it’s in our company ethos – Clarity & Bravery.

Bravery is something we bring to every digital product we work on. As we highlighted in the case of 11Onze, you can make brave choices with confidence that they will deliver through the use of science, data & art. We always push our client partners to do what is possible and right for their customers and we try to not allow technology to limit our scope but actually empower it.

So next time you hear the word MVP (minimal viable product), try and substitute it in your mind for MLP (most ❤️ lovable product).

📸 Shots from the event

WONDR is proud to announce that it is now a member of ADG-FAD (Asociación de diseñadores gráficos y directores de arte)

The ADG-FAD (Associació de dissenyadors gràfics i directors d’art) are based in Barcelona, Spain and for more than 50 years, its goal has been to promote design and visual communication in Spain’s cultural and economic life.

11Onze  x  WONDR  x  Barcelona

WONDR’s collaboration with 11Onze, to foster and grow a fintech community, shares similar values with ADG-FAD of empowering the community with insightful knowledge to enable them to develop further.

The WONDR team plan on sharing our knowledge and expertise with the design community in Spain, especially insights on how we collaborated with 11Onze to create ‘First-ever Fintech Private Social Network‘ in Barcelona.

We’re always looking to bring innovation to every collaboration that we do through our LAB+ model.

Sometimes we use this model to look at emerging technologies or existing ones that need a transformation and imagine what is possible.

We highlighted the ‘Music Industry’ as an example of a sector that has been digitalised to a point where ‘the soul‘ has been lost.

Recently we purchased a U2 hoodie as part of the ‘All that you can’t leave behind’ 20th anniversary. The customer journey didn’t deliver an exciting end-to-end fan experience. It followed the usual expected e-Commerce journey, no different to purchasing books or electronics online.

It got us thinking that there is a huge opportunity to transform this by creating an immersive experience for bands, teams and sportspeople who have a huge cult following like U2 do.

We ran our own internal workshops and came up with the idea ‘U2 By You’.

We understand the great reach and flexibility digital apps like Spotify bring, however some things have been lost. Our proposition has been designed to bring fans together as a digital community to share experiences, memories, experience exclusive band material and allow them the chance to contribute to a vast neural network of U2 memories from across the globe.

The results of this is an idea that helps to bring a richer experience for loyal fans where they can also watch concerts, listen to the back catalogue, merchandise and tours in a new manner that has never been done before.

We also put together a special landing page where you get a quick overview before downloading the presentation we shared directly with the band themselves, which we received very positive feedback on.

We’re sharing our concept presentation as fans and would love to hear what you think about #U2byYOU on Linkedin or Twitter.

Delivering a great digital customer experience is no easy task. Here’s how KBC Bank Ireland and its Head of Digital Channels, Paul Flynn, set out on a mission to ensure that their customers would get the best possible experience through their website.

“Putting the customer experience at the heart of the plan was my main priority.”

The customer champions

Paul set out on a journey to do this by firstly finding like-minded champions of the customer across the organisation. They were all digital natives, used to online experiences that are fast and easy to use, and would not offer anything less to their customers.

They were creative people and were winning over the hearts and minds of their teams by elevating IT to be about the customer, and making their decisions based on data. People found their approaches fresh and innovative, and he knew that he needed them in my team.

Paul brought them together from across the organisation, from marketing to the legal and data teams — forming an extended team of customer champions. They created a plan to replace the existing website with one that delivers a superior digital experience for their customers.

With help from WONDR (specialists in Digital Product Design) they collected all the information needed for the project and converted stakeholders to collaborators by enlisting them as advisors. WONDR created a beautiful new design language for the website and selected Liferay, a cloud-enabled digital experience platform as the foundation for the new solution.

We listened to what customers wanted

The digital champions took feedback from customers on board when working on the new enhanced site. Customer feedback showed them that the site had too much jargon, used language that did not relate to the customer, calculators were hard to use and finding the information they were after was difficult.

Taking this on board, KBC worked with WONDR to define 8 personas with needs and goals; and offered key insights for each. They then mapped out the steps on the journeys, and designed an experience that would maximise good emotions, eliminate pain points and feel familiar to the customer.

But they wanted more, and found ways for their brand to shine as part of the digital experience. Armed with a powerful new technology, a detailed plan, a compelling vision and lots of excitement, the team went to work.

Making the complex, simple

The customer champions approached the project in a new way . They would work in a real agile way instead to get the project off the ground.

They would deal with complexity and uncertainty by working out the finer details as the project went on and rely on the talent of the team to adapt as needed. They brought in Webtown, a customer-centric software development company.

By putting in the Liferay digital experience platform as a foundation they managed to get a more up-to date starting point for the website development. This offered faster speed, better accessibility and mobile support out of the box.

While rebuilding the calculators on the site using the new design, the team were able to leverage the developer’s experience to reverse-engineer what was there to re-create the calculators in a way that gave the website administrators more control while making the website easier to use for customers.

The customer champions developed new, enterprise-ready ways of working for the development. They brought in cloud-based technology that enabled them to develop safely and release frequently.

Then they introduced better practices for documentation, accessibility and data quality management in the team. This led to a higher quality experience and vastly improved usability, because they continued to improve and iterate on the experience while the project went on. This would also make sure the solution would stand the test of time.

The customer champions had all rallied behind the vision to make decisions based on data and give the customers what they wanted, so were able to take decisive action when needed.

The Outcomes

The new solution was very well received. Customer feedback highlighted that the new experience was really easy to use and helped them make decisions.

30% Conversion Rate Increase
The new website outperformed the old one with a 30% higher conversion rate, so the project paid itself back really quickly.

Call Centre Efficiency
The call centre staff were saving time because customers gave them the right information.

Would you like to see more?

• Visit the KBC website
• Learn more about the development methodology applied by Webtown-group.com/KBC.
• Learn more about LifeRay.

In changing times like today, client retention is more crucial than ever.

ESB Energy saw an opportunity with the company’s rebrand to consolidate three websites, improve the digital experience and increasing conversion rates for EV, B2C and B2B customers.

This was the challenge for Irish electricity giant ESB in the UK market, which provides power to more than 100,000 homes each day in the UK. With 100% renewable electricity, the company offers competitive prices and over 90 years of industry experience. The goal was to launch ESB Energy as a digital-first experience and grow the brand through easy to complete sign up flows.

WONDR focused on planning a design system that could work across all digital touch points. We designed the experience across the product site, acquisition funnels and customer portal across mobile, tablet and desktop.

With clarity and a collaborative team approach, we delivered a quote journey with a 95% form completion rate and a customer portal which over 86% of customers used.

Find the detailed cases study for ESB Energy here.