We’re pleased to announce that our work with ESB Networks was the Winner of Best Energy & Utilities Website at the 2022 Progress Sitefinity Website of the Year Awards.

This years awards were evaluated across six categories of criteria—visual design, content, layout and navigation, complexity, innovation and significance—and selected through public voting with more than 6,200 votes cast.

The ESB Networks website serves as a public face to the utility where users can register new connections, report faults, submit meter readings and also get real time updates on power outages in their area.

For more than a decade, the Progress Sitefinity Website of the Year Awards have recognised exceptional global digital experiences that deliver to their customers and end users.

The contest was open for all Sitefinity platform deployments that were launched or significantly upgraded in the past year. Progress technology is used by hundreds of thousands of enterprises, including 1,700 software companies and 3.5 million developers.

About ESB Networks

As part of ESB Group, ESB Networks are licensed to build, operate, maintain and develop the electricity network in the Republic of Ireland. With over 2.3 million electricity customers across the country, the brand plays a key role in keeping Ireland’s power network active & connected, whilst enhancing the network with the latest smart & sustainable technology.

Radiocentre Ireland has been launched to promote the effectiveness of radio/audio to brands, advertisers and agencies in the Republic of Ireland.

Radiocentre Ireland,a newly formed body brought together by RTÉ and the Independent Broadcasters of Ireland, teamed up with ourselves to develop a vibrant digital brand launch that could be used across web and physical events to enable them to showcase the power of radio & audio as a medium.

With over 3.2 million Irish adults listening to the radio every single day, the brand led with a more youthful visual language to better reflect the changing demographics of listeners across Ireland.

Bespoke Irish Research

In an era of endless choices for brands & agencies to spend their marketing budgets, Radiocentre Ireland will be commissioning bespoke research to measure the effectiveness of radio & audio in Ireland to demonstrate its return on investment.

According to similar studies in the UK, for every £1 spent by advertisers on radio & audio, on average they get a return on investment of £7.70. The Irish research will look to validate, measure and build trust in the medium to help increase its share of marketing budgets.

The site provides access to special events, latest trends & research reports in order to provide a depth of trustworthy information for brands, advertisers & agencies on the reach and impact of radio & audio as a marketing medium across Ireland.

WONDR is proud to be the winners of Best Digital Product at the global UX Design Awards.

The award was for our work on ESB’s (Electricity Supply Board) Real-Time Visualisation (RTV) application.

This was a unique and special dashboard of complex power generation data from every power station in Ireland (including renewables) that acts as a single source of truth.

The award was introduced by Lisa Gerkens, Forward31 | Porsche Digital and accepted by WONDR Design Lead, Mariana Spagnuolo and Founder, Dermot O’Shea.

Whilst WONDR & ESB couldn’t collect the award in person in Berlin due to the pandemic, we accepted the award at the virtual ceremony which you can view here.

ESB – A Data Driven Digital Utility

ESB is the leading Irish utility focused on providing competitive and sustainable energy solutions to the Irish public. Built on Microsoft Azure, RTV facilitates the management of energy generation and trading, and allows the business to make realtime decisions for trading energy.

Daragh Noctor, ESB Generation & Trading Analytics Manager | CIO Analytics, highlighted how…

“RTV blends market, business, asset and station information to create a business narrative in a clear, compelling and engaging way that helps inform its audience on decision making. It’s success is evidenced in its daily use by Station management, Engineering, Trading and right up to the Executive level.”

About the UX Design Awards

The UX Design Awards are one of the most prestigious international awarding bodies, who honor the impact accomplished UX design has on shaping a positive living environment for all. Congratulations to our lovely clients and the fantastic WONDR team who worked together to deliver world class work.

The awards are run by the International Design Centre Berlin, who this year celebrate their 50th anniversary. Previous winners at the UX Design Awards include Mercedes Benz, Microsoft, Samsung, Philips, Dyson and Bang & Olufsen to name but a few.

We’re shortlisted for 2 awards at Digital Business Ireland’s – National Digital Awards 2021.

Our own site wondr.io has been shortlisted for Best Professional Services Website, whilst our work for Likha Aesthetic Clinic has also been shortlisted for ‘Best Health, Beauty, Well-Being Website‘.

The awards recognise the very best of digital in Ireland and reward businesses, organisations, people and innovations.

👏🏼  We’re thankful for being shortlisted and we look forward to the event on the 23rd Feb 2022.

We’re proud to say that both nominated sites have also picked up global awards this year, so we’re 🤞🏽hoping to get some 🇮🇪 Irish recognition too.

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.

Our design work for Likha Aesthetic Clinic has won an International award for ‘Best Website’ in the beauty & cosmetics category.

The Vega Digital Awards are an international body that exists to recognise and honor the outstanding performance, talent and effort of the best digital professionals and web agencies around the world. Judged independently by experienced, senior-level digital professionals from around the world, the categories include websites, video, mobile, social, animation, marketing and podcasts.

We designed Likha Aesthetic Clinic with a mobile-first approach that had AI integrated into the design process. This allowed us to test and evaluate designs in real-time using data that matches the behaviour of over 93% of humans.

Moving to desktop designs, we had even more fun bringing the treatments to life with a rich desktop experience using motion design and animations.

Serial Award Winner

In addition to winning this international design award for best website in beauty & cosmetics, LikhaAesthetic.ie has also picked up global award for ‘Mobile Excellence‘ and an Honorable Mention from Awwwards as well as a Special Kudos award from CSSDA.

Founded in 2019, the clinic has also won Best Aesthetic Clinic in Ireland two years in a row, as well as a Patient Service Award from What Clinic for outstanding customer reviews.

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.

We’re always looking to bring innovation to every collaboration 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 our founder 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.

Out of our internal workshops came 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 will shortly be sharing the work on our site. You can sign up below to be the first to see this.

Please note that by hitting confirm you are accepting our terms & conditions.

We’re shortlisted for 2 awards at The Institute of Designers Ireland’s IDI awards 2021.

We were shortlisted for Best Experience Design & Rising Star. The awards showcase the best in Irish design across fashion/textiles, product, digital, visual comms, structures & spaces.

We’re obviously honoured to be shortlisted and we’re looking forward to the awards night itself.

Marketers spend hours trying to grow sales and optimise Google and Facebook ad spends. The solution is Optily, a smart platform that automatically organises and optimises digital advertising campaigns.

To help them launch this innovative new platform, the team at Optily (formally Bionic) tasked WONDR to realise a 360° rebrand, encompassing naming, identity, visual language and digital experience to the US market.

We built a platform by strategically blending user experience and brand storytelling. Turning our attention to the digital experience, we saw an opportunity to take our brand concept of delving deeper and transform it into an engaging, interactive experience.

In addition to product, case study and pricing pages, a robust digital publishing system was incorporated into the website. This provides the brand with an editorialised platform through which to house and share the latest in industry insights and opinions.

Discover more details on the Optily Case Study here.