Adobe Success Story

Rapid interaction design
Leading business information company uses Adobe Fireworks CS3 to quickly create interactive prototypes for websites and subscription-based tools

The name Hoover’s is synonymous with information. Hoover’s, Inc., a D&B company, gives its customers a competitive edge with insightful information for sales, marketing, business development, and other professionals. Hoover’s offers this proprietary business information through the Internet, data feeds, wireless devices, and co-branding agreements with other online services. Using Adobe Fireworks CS3 software, a component of the integrated Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium package, Hoover’s designers create the visual design, layout, and interaction design that helps keep Hoover’s visitors engaged and informed.

Benefits

• Enables Hoover’s to respond quickly to changing business conditions
• Reduces the amount of prototype editing and production work
• Simplifies the transition from design to development
• Accelerates delivery of professional, easy-to-access tools and materials for end users

Project Details

Relevant, up-to-date information
The Hoover’s website features a database of information on more than 26 million corporations and organizations. Offering both free and for-pay content, the firm focuses on selling subscriptions to marketing, sales, and business development professionals who need information about industries, companies, and key decision makers.

A team of interaction designers assumes responsibility for building the websites, as well as the prospecting and risk management tools for sales and marketing professionals. Prospecting tools, specifically Selectory.com and Hoovers.com, offer flexible list-building capabilities. Site visitors enter one or more criteria—such as industry, sales numbers, location, or keywords—and get contact information, histories, financials, and more for companies and people.

Keeping the Hoover’s company pages and the company’s subscription-based services relevant and up-to-date is a full-time job. Information changes and new pages are added, requiring designers to create new layouts and test interaction designs. “Our projects can range from entire website redesigns to basic application or website maintenance,” says Anthony Morales, senior interaction designer for Hoover’s.

Creating multipage prototypes
Projects begin with the creation of wireframes that depict the layout and placement of design elements in the interface design. Hoover’s designers use Fireworks CS3 to create everything from wireframes and comps to working website prototypes. “The comps and working page prototypes we create using Adobe Fireworks CS3 illustrate our ideas and bring them to life,” says Morales.

The look of the entire Hoover’s website was prototyped using Fireworks CS3 and the multipage support feature. With multipage support, designers can create multiple pages in a single document that help to simulate website flow in a prototype. This feature was a key reason for the design team at Hoover’s to standardize on Fireworks CS3 software.

Layers can be shared from one page to another and designers can make changes to common elements that are instantly reflected across multiple pages. Multipage support also enables designers to include different ideas for the same page in a single document to keep things more organized.

Working with multiple pages at once enables the team to make quick mock-ups and changes during user testing, before spending the time to build out HTML/CSS. Using Fireworks CS3 saves editing time and production work, increasing overall design productivity by 30%. “Using Adobe Fireworks CS3 enables our designers to come up with more revenue-generating ideas and website improvements, without worrying about time-intensive prototype build cycles,” explains Morales.

Design simplification
Using the seamless editing capabilities with pixels and vectors in Fireworks CS3 helps designers create shapes and edit images in sample applications. The resulting images are intuitive to work with and move around easily within the design framework, making it easier for designers to test out multiple ideas without major rework.

Hoover’s designers use the common library to share frequently used images and symbols rather than redrawing them on each page. “The intelligent 9-slice scaling tool in Adobe Fireworks CS3 helps designers quickly create and scale multiple symbols, speeding the production of rich, interactive prototypes,” says Morales.

After a design is finalized, the team creates an HTML prototype that users can click through and then submits it to one or more rounds of user testing to determine what changes or additions are needed.

Next, the project moves into production where the team finalizes the HTML/CSS that will drive the site or pages. Designers slice up Fireworks CS3 designs, drop them into an HTML editor such as Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, and then hand over the final HTML/CSS to the production team, which handles any necessary PHP, Java, or database hookups. “Creating prototypes in Adobe Fireworks CS3 simplifies the transition from design to development,” comments Morales.

A comprehensive solution
Hoover’s user experience and design team also provides marketing and advertising support services. The team creates targeted, interactive elements using Adobe Flash CS3 Professional for the Hoover’s website and the company’s subscription-based tools to engage site visitors and advertising sponsors. Designers love being able to include video in advertisements and website features created in Flash CS3 Professional.

All print advertising, as well as the layout for Hoover’s catalogs and books, is done in Adobe InDesign CS3, with support from Photoshop CS3 Extended and Illustrator CS3. Publications are often converted to Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files so customers can easily download them from the website and view them using the ubiquitous Adobe Reader software.

Overall, Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium software provides Hoover’s with a competitive advantage in a crowded market. Fast prototyping enables the company to quickly implement website changes in response to changing business conditions and shorten the time to market for new tools and services. Integrated Adobe solutions make it easy to produce print and online materials for subscribers that meet Hoover’s high quality and usability standards. “Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium software helps us create better user experiences,” concludes Morales.

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