Vallehermoso Telecom

Vallehermoso Telecom is the telecommunications branch of Spain's leading proprety developer. Revelate, working in collaboration with Pixelpark Madrid and Passionpixels London provided a complete design solution for a private portal open only to the clients of the company.

The portal has two main areas:

• Content specific to the customers of Vallehermoso such as utility bills, house plans etc
• General portal content such as news, email and so on.

Although only the customer specific content required login, it was decided that the whole portal would only be available to Vallehermoso house owners.

Revelate suggested several features that could lever the fact that the user has to login, including a warning of incoming mail present on all pages of the portal. Precisely the same feature has since been introduced on MSN messenger.

Another personalisation feature was progressive focus on the users location: Regional news, town listings up to announcements from the neighbourood community or the building janitor.

Given the broad range of users and the complexity of such a site, the main focus of the design is to make it easy to use and flexible to implement.

Global navigation bars were considered but abandoned in favour of a system of microsites and directory listings. These enabled the range of content to be scanned more easily and the navigation to be focused on the users current task. This makes sense if we wonder what a user reading a news article is most likely interested in: reading another news article or jumping to a totally different area of the site.

By using few images in the layout, we kept the page weights low and download times to a minimum. We then applied this design to the specific areas and tools of the site, leveraging the flexibility of the system to fit the layout precisely to the needs of each area and make sure that all page elements were relevant.