Microsoft surface work for First Direct

Splendid help the UK’s most loved brand explain the benefits of ‘offsetting’ with the help of Microsoft Surface to an audience of Grand Designers

The Brief
First Direct were main sponsor of the Grand Village at this year’s Grand Designs Live. First Direct needed to create an experience and environment that allowed visitors to engage and interact the FD team, ask questions, gain awareness of FD mortgages and an understanding of the benefits of offsetting.

Splendid worked with media agency Mindshare to introduce pioneering Microsoft Surface technology to First Direct. This technology allows users to directly interact with digital content, without the using a mouse or keyboard.

First Direct immediately saw the benefit of using this new technology at the show. It also gave visitors the ability to ‘play’ with a fictitious financial situation, in an intelligent way, providing education, and engagement in equal measure.

What we did
Splendid held several collaborative design sessions with First Direct to establish the main flow through the exhibition space, the delivery of the core messages and how visitors would interact with the technology. We also worked with the financial team at FD to ensure the application met the financial rules and regulations.

The resulting Microsoft Surface application allowed visitors to interact with various sample Grand Design projects. Each project type was housed within a digital card. When the visitors wanted to see how they could afford to complete a similar project they could flip this card over to play with the offsetting calculator. The calculator itself enabled visitors to discover the core benefits of offset and demonstrate how much they can reduce their monthly payments or reduce the length of their term and save money.

The underlying application is created with Microsoft’s new WPF platform running on the .Net 3.5 Framework with SP1. Specifically the visual asset authoring and UX work was brought together with Microsoft Expression Blend and Visual Studio.

Client quote
Often consumers get overwhelmed by mortgage information and confused by all the different options. Microsoft Surface with Splendid’s help offered the public a user friendly, fun and incredibly engaging way to find out how our product could save them money.

Lisa Wood
Head of Brand Communications, first direct