Designing a leading app experience - App UX & Motion

The branding for Westfield Plus is derived from the core Westfield branding, bringing in the signature logo and “W” device as well as the red colour palette and recurring patterns, such as the angles and tessellating patterns.

Our branding strategy for Westfield Plus began with brand workshops to align the app’s design with Westfield’s core values and focus on enhancing user experience. These sessions ensured the branding resonated with its target audience, emphasising functionality and engagement.

We developed a custom icon and illustration language designed to improve UX by making navigation intuitive and the interface visually engaging, simplifying user interactions and boosting usability.

We crafted a design system for the Westfield Plus app focused on usability, brand consistency, and a mobile-first approach, ensuring seamless operation on mobile devices. The system aligns with Westfield’s brand identity and includes tailored components for iOS and Android, following Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines and Android’s Material Design. This design strategy ensures a consistent and optimised user experience across all platforms.

The app design for Westfield Plus was massive and meant more than a year of strategy, workshops, roadmap, exploration, discovery, scoping, designing and experimenting.

Beyond the core features (Parking, Map, Stores), many of the new ideas stemmed from solving for visitor problems and opportunities when entering a complex, for example:
“I want to recall where I parked my car”: forgetting where you parked is a pretty common thing, perhaps we could bring this into the app with a letter + number selector?
“I want to visit the centre when it’s not packed”: maybe you’re going for lunch and want to avoid queues like a lot of CBD workers do! maybe we can visualise popular visiting times.
“I want to find the toilets easily”: highlighting common communal areas on Today could be helpful.

While we were designing the Westfield Plus app, we took great care exploring animation, illustrations, 3D rendering, sounds and haptics to create a more vibrant and lively feeling. As one front on the mission to push the boundaries of this app’s design, we decided to experiment with motion design for “key moments” in the app, for example:

• Finishing onboarding
• Adding a plate to your account for the first time
• Wrapping up your Hands-Free or Valet experience.

For example, we experimented with the visual concept of “tokens”, which raised many questions: what does a token look like (a coin, a ticket)? How can we bring the core principle of vibrancy to this moment, what does it look like? How can we make the user feel super good about completing this task?

To create a shared vision of Westfield Plus among the team, we created a sizzle reel using some high-level mockups and footage from here and there. This ended up being one of our favourite parts of the project as it articulated the vision so well.