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Credit Photo: Zoox
Zoox
An immersive storytelling experience to usher in the age of autonomous vehicles.
Credit Photo: Zoox
/01 Context
Zoox is an autonomous vehicle company headquartered in Foster City, California. In order to educate the public about their built from the ground-up robotaxi, we created for Zoox an immersive, scroll-enabled .com. The website earned a number of industry accolades – including the Webby for “Best Visual Design - Functionality” – in 2021.
We began with a multitude of low-fidelity sketches to brainstorm ideas for motion, transition, and content. We then moved on to wireframes to finalize the content and user journey/behaviors.
Throughout the project, we worked together with our client, the way we often do. It meant we could make decisions together, balancing technical and design, and making educated choices towards the desired outcome.
/02 The experience
Zoox is currently creating a robotaxi fleet and ride-hailing service. The website revolves around telling Zoox’s story in a way that can be easily understood by users, leveraging 3D assets, visual content, and scroll mechanics to deliver the message in the most effective way.
An ah-ha moment occurred when we decided to involve the actual rounded shape of the Zoox vehicle in every single aspect of the art direction. From frames to borders to buttons and beyond, the robotaxi design is present on each possible level.
From here, we stayed true to our initial sketches. Things moved in many different ways, but the core idea didn’t change. Developing a strong vision and backstory for the project before jumping further enabled us to find consistency throughout the entire project.
/03 Under the Hood
We had a huge challenge delivering a high quantity of animated visual assets under a reasonable weight, while ensuring the entire experience came out as smooth as possible on a wide range of devices.
To help mitigate the large load times, we incorporated realtime WebGL in a browser and leaned on techniques the video game industry pioneered a while ago, bringing our own twist to it. The result was a beautiful, fluid experience that balanced visual fidelity and asset weight, keeping load times down and ensuring a graceful user experience.
By seamlessly integrating our efforts with our client, we fostered a collaborative environment where decisions were made jointly, harmonizing our technological expertise and creative vision with Zoox’s established branding and devops protocols. Throughout the project, we maintained a particularly strong partnership with Zoox’s in-house Lead 3D Artist, whose invaluable contributions laid a sturdy foundation for our UI design, and played an indispensable role in crafting a fluid and immersive user experience.
Both our teams (Dogstudio and Zoox) are thrilled with the result and obviously saw space for optimization and improvements. We’re now collaborating on making the entire experience even better. More than our personal satisfaction, we noticed the project was met with an exceptionally positive reaction from the public–the greatest reward of all.
/04 Outcomes
The website was the centerpiece of Zoox’s strategic marketing and PR plan to reveal its vehicle after 5 years of working in complete stealth mode. Knowing this, we created a dedicated press room. Publications could get everything they needed in one spot, and as a result, the press coverage was swift and extensive. There were over 500 articles written about Zoox in the two after the launch including articles on New York Times, Fast Company, and Boomberg.