Rob Varney

My goal is to help design the best design agency in the world. I'm the Creative Director at Foolproof, and responsible for the quality of ideas and insight we generate for our clients. I established design as a core discipline at Foolproof, and introduced new working practices, team structure and working environment. I also sit on Foolproof's Leadership team, and help steer the direction of our practice, delivering new ways to improve the design advice we provide. My skills are very much centred around understanding the commercial advantages of deploying good design, and how clients can create better experiences for their customers. I've provided strategic and creative leadership on projects for clients in the FS, Media, FMCG and Entertainment sectors. My focus is always to generate and refine ideas using insight gathered from the people who pay for the work, and the people who are going to use it. I firmly believe this delivers the most valuable ideas. Designing with complex information, journeys and interaction patterns has been a big part of my career, be it publishing design for government, to application or modelling tools for financial products.

Bringing Suzuki car’s showroom experience online.

30 min Case study | Categeory: UX | Target Audience: Marketing directors, Product designers, CX directors

Our presentation will explain how we brought the showroom experience online, and helped give Suzuki buyers more confidence when it came to choosing their next vehicle. We’ll tell this story with examples of how the design evolved from sketches to live website, the role customer research took, and how you adopt a way of working that brings all the elements of a modern day web experience together. Without visiting a showroom, it's hard for car buyers to understand which car is right for them. The role of Suzuki’s website was to drive footfall to their dealers. But it was failing to deliver. The abundance of choice is a problem for customers, with an ever more bewildering combination of trim levels, body styles and customisable specifications. Our job was to find the most effective ways of helping customers through this journey, and improve their chances of purchasing the right car in the dealership, through customer research and iterative design. Following our redesign and rebuild of Suzuki cars website Suzuki saw a 14% increase in test drive requests and a 63% increase in brochure requests. Suzuki’s research shows nearly 70% of people who test drive a Suzuki car go on to buy.

Three key takeaways

• How you rapidly prototype, test and iterate design solutions.

• Giving customers a better feel for your product without seeing it.

• The skills and ways of working you need to deliver a successful web experience.