Alexander
Myles Palmer
Founder & Creative Director
Willem Purdy
Senior Digital Designer
Josh Ellis
Fullstack Developer
Axelle Van de Goor
Producer
Introduction
Alexander is the place to discover new, original, hour-long features from around the world – from culture to crime, Hollywood to the environment, science to sexuality.
Curated by experts, not by algorithms, Alexander offers a focused and high-quality experience across audio and text that other platforms cannot rival.
Their stories are written and reported by acclaimed authors and journalists, narrated by renowned actors and accompanied by visionary short films released exclusively through the app every two weeks.
Challenge
Alexander had launched a beta on iOS and was gaining traffic and social praise, but the team had fears that some of their important features were being missed and their fantastic storytelling was being buried by a lack of structure in the app.
In addition to this, the design of the application was geared more towards expression of the companies identity, rather than clarity of use for the consumer — and often veered too far into a literary world.
For Alexander to take the next step we needed to rebuild the application from scratch for both iOS and Android at the same time: offering feature parity and delivering exceptional content in an accessible, beautiful, immersive way.
Our discovery processes covered audiences, visual tastemaking, communication strategy and feature prioritisation.
Approach
Through a series of discovery workshops with the Alexander team, we questioned and dissected what they felt had been working for them and what areas we needed to address since the launch of the beta.
Based on that, our aim was to bring more familiar design patterns to Alexander that ensured it was more accessible and usable for the audience, whilst retaining the charm that the Alexander team liked of the current application.
We broke down our findings from these discovery sessions into three main areas. Discovery of content, utilisation of features and creating clear communication of the apps proposition and offering.
The new app now utilises the unique offering that Alexander has and allows users to browse, explore and share content with ease.
As part of the project, we redesigned Alexanders website to fully expand on the apps features and bring harmony to the visual language across all platforms.
We are greatful to all collaborators & freelancers that worked on this project with Companion such as Liam Hine 🧡.
"Companion does the detailed exploration and learning of your company and its vision, to then go above and beyond with design and delivery of technology that connects with your audiences and propels the company vision."
