Form Follows Book with TYPO3
More space for authors and books: 3m5. relaunches Piper Verlag web portal with new UX design.
The context
Founded out of love for books and readers, the Munich-based Piper Verlag has stood for the desire for literary mediation and a non-telite understanding of literature for over 100 years.
Its staff's dedicated engagement with writers, manuscripts and themes has for decades produced an authentic product - if the works of such diverse authors as Hannah Arendt, Ingeborg Bachmann, Charlotte Roche, Reinhold Messner, Michael Moore and Hape Kerkeling are to be seen as products at all.
Piper Verlag stands for a cosmopolitan atmosphere in which every author can find his place and every reader can find his book. The traditional publisher belongs to the Swedish Bonnier Group, one of the largest media companies in the world.
The mission
The pages were to become more modern in design and at the same time more user-friendly. "Our motto was: Form Follows Book, which means that the focus is absolutely on literature," says Caroline Bock, head of UX design at 3m5. "The publisher wanted to give authors and their works more space, give them greater leeway and open up new offers, including their own pages, dates and blogs." In short: the new online offering was to become more attractive not only for readers and users, but also for authors - after all, even big publishing houses like Piper have to woo writers.
All in all, the team planned a consistent user-centricity, which also required a stronger integration and optimisation for search engines. The connection of existing interfaces for book and image management was also necessary.
Strategy and implementation
The book covers are in focus against a discreet grey-white background. The world at Piper is clearly structured, this structure adapts to the preferences of the users: First the bestsellers, then the publisher's recommendations. This is followed by a blog, a new element that draws users' attention to exciting books, the new novel by a bestselling author or a current competition.
Of course, all books can be ordered directly via this page - a connection of the TYPO3 system via an interface to the shop software makes this possible. In addition, there is a new structured search. This means: the hits on the search queries appear as a sorted list divided into the four categories books, authors, events and blog articles.
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