Taste success

When the new head of ITV.com joined in late 2010, one of his first projects was to overhaul food.

Up to that point, all food related content lived on individual show websites. This meant there was no easy way for people to search for recipes across the entire brand. Realising the value this content had to audiences and advertisers, the ITV Food concept was born.

Clearleft were initially asked to undertake a 6 week consultancy project to help plan the product strategy. Working across different business units we consulted with producers, content editors, audience researchers and the technical team to develop a product roadmap.

With the project plan approved in early 2011 we were asked to lead the User Experience Design, Visual Design and Front End Development portion of the project. Back end development was undertaken by the excellent folks at Miggle and Tobias & Tobias .

Over a 3 month period we created a new ontology for food, prototyped the interaction design and tested it on a sample of viewers over several iterations. During this time ITV commissioned a set of Visual Design Guidelines across all of their digital properties. This was challenging as the guidelines were constantly changing throughout the process. However this meant that Clearleft were the first agency to use these guidelines and ITV Food became the test-case for the new VDG as well as possible future verticals.

Our team spent a further 2 months developing a modular set of layouts, components and typographic styles in HTML/CSS/JavaScript; then worked with our development partners to ensure these were seamlessly integrated into their back-end.