Focus: Managing QA Process & Technical Photo Editing
Client: Orange LV
Year: 2018-2019
Client: Orange LV
Year: 2018-2019
Mizuno, one of the leading sport equipment brands, had a highly successful custom on-demand manufacturing configurator for baseball and softball gloves that lets users customize, view, and order the items. Armands was solo contracted as a quality assurance lead and technical editing support.
Each glove has a lot of dynamic changeable parts like stamps indentions, shadows, that need to be prepared for that by photo post-processing. When all those parts are processed consistently with each other, the customers feel much more certain about the product and are inclined to leave positive reviews.
Another focus was to achieve a comprehensive representation of the product, which usually is based on the harmonious look of all photos used in the configurator. It was achieved by making sure all the details including glove panels, webs, laces, knots, and even small stitching are cut out perfectly.
When there is an option to preview the item in three views, there emerges the need for a method to easily check out for any bugs or differences between the views in the hundreds of photo assets. If the views are consistent, the tool becomes more trustable and robust among competitor configurators.
Visitors often feel a need to share their custom creations of the product if all the details are working properly and allowing them to create the dream custom design including dynamic 16 flags, ribbons, special metallic colors, fonts, and stamps.
A lot of the customizable details like stitches, stamps, flags, numbers, and even textures are photo edited and warped to fit with other photo parts. This however creates a need for testing of precise matching with the photo angles and perspective, which improves visitors' certainty and consequently increases the conversation rate and purchase values.
The tool has up to almost a hundred special photo and adjustment layers for each of 36 glove models with thousands of possible element combinations. This kind of variety requires diligent testing so that all the details overlay one another perfectly so that the visuals would create the wow factor in the visitors.
Users tend to spend much longer time experimenting with product customizers instead of conventional webshops, largely due to countless customization options like in this case up to 27 colors available in Mizuno configurator for each glove part. The configurator was tested to have the coloring consistent for all the different details.
