We love working with

Haynes Manuals (MOL)

Haynes Manuals, established in 1960 are vehicle manuals based in Sparkford, UK.
We have done a lot of projects for Haynes, including the OnDemand manuals (coming soon), a general upgrade of the US and UK sites, the editorial sections and then the Manuals Online section – MOL.

Brand | Design | Website

ONLINE MANUAL COVERS

2000+ Manuals recreated

 

ONLINE ADS AND WEB UX

Redesign across 4 territories

 

MOL PROJECT – PRINT MANUALS DIGITAL VERSIONS

Design and UX journey

Haynes On Demand

We have designed many elements over the last year of Haynes digital output. This is the first major project that has come to fruition with a large design aspect – the rest being largely strategic.

The design and function rests on making more use of the screen and allowing, when there is room, a rather funky tiered navigation system. For mobile you get a much simpler version which means you concentrate on your current navigation choices. Designed by Practically, created by Haynes internal team.

We replaced the existing Haynes Manuals Online (which looked like the screenshots shown here). The old interface was very hard to use, impossibly so on mobile. Moreover it was different across territories and brands making it harder still to use.

We fairly quickly realised that any redesign would also need a redesign of 2000+ covers across three territories – bikes, cars and more. So began many months of worth with Haynes data team and ourselves where we manually produced these covers – we all naively believed that these could be produced programatically.

On Demand Logo

One of the first things we did was to animate the On Demand logo, immediately setting out the new brand as something different, digital and new.

Haynes Digital Manual Covers

Part of the MOL project was to recreate digital versions of the iconic Haynes Manuals. This included making, and then generating 1000’s of covers.

The trick was to create recognisable Haynes covers but make them different enough to be digital, as well as being simpler for smaller, online, use.

To create the covers, we built some scripts using InDesign to generate the covers from xml files and our own template.

UX and Banner Improvements

We also created a huge number of custom banners for various campaigns across the website and beyond. The aim was to drive sales to the On Demand brochures, but this widened into looking at all internal and external advertising across the business.

Under the Hood

This is a pure UX and design project, which is rare but rather exciting treat for us, here at Practically.io.

In other words another agency were responsible for dealing with the client and for building and implementing our heavy lifting thinking.

 

Why we think

This project is sexy

Did we mention, this is Haynes Manuals!

This is a really modern UX piece of work for a really old, established brand. Creating the digital covers as a batch, and massaging the data and images that build those covers was rather exciting. We designed and generated 1000s of Haynes Manual covers for the digital only (video based) versions.

Chairman’s reaction to our new logo.

“That is lovely.”