Shenshi Case Study | Part E - Platform and Design

The media host sites were chosen to maximize the visual experience of images, video, animations, text, and stories because visual communication resonates strongly with the target demographic persona.

Pinterest is image rich by design. It is the fastest growing social platform and is used by more men than women in the UK. It targets graphics-intensive interests like fashion. Its red color scheme draws attention, and conveys energy, excitement and movement. This is a good color for the target audience because we want to motivate them to feel that they are more successful than they are. Red is associated with sports cars like Ferraris. Red is a symbol of life—“red blooded male”. This sits well because we want to foster ambition and passion for success. The Lobster font of Pinterest is visually interesting and stands out from the crowd.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform that empowers creativity, followership and social sharing of multiple media types, e.g. photos, gifs, video, music, quotes, chats, links, text and complex embedded data such as Storify visual storylines. It is a much more visual, image-based site than a typical corporate blog which suits the visually-oriented preferences of the target persona who wants to be visually stimulated with lots of graphics and short bursts of text before deciding what to investigate further on more text-rich media.

Storify is used to create stories from images, video, and text from the web or social networks with drag-and-drop simplicity. Embedding Storify in Tumblr is easy. 

Because the persona typically uses mobile devices as their content consumption choice for commutes, choosing media hosting sites that looked good and performed well on mobile device platforms was essential. All the above media work extremely smoothly on mobile even with single-handed operation. Responsive design means viewing is optimized for either mobile or desktop platforms.