Creating Better Collaboration
As one of Europe’s most innovative energy companies E.ON has built a proactive brand space and design system within Frontify. Open to all employees, the company has turned its Frontify presence into a hub where its teams engage and get creative with the brand.
Based in Essen, Germany, E.ON is an international energy company and Europe’s largest network operator. With more than 78k employees, it serves more than 50 million customers across 13 countries.
We met up with Holger Castritius, Head of UX at E.ON to discuss their adoption of Frontify, which was first introduced to the UX department in October 2017 and has since then been adopted across the entire company. E.ON has built a fullyfledged design system on Frontify which is used by their designers and has helped consolidate everything brand-related, raising the standard of cross-team exchange, handovers, and workflows significantly.
In the digital world, it is particularly important for us to create a coherent brand experience across different touchpoints and regions.
To enable strong brand management, E.ON knew it needed to engage its users and provide a platform that was more than an asset repository. By establishing its living brand space with Frontify, the company achieved that successfully. For Holger: “UX is not there to set the brand vision of the company, but instead, and more importantly, it serves to understand and translate it into (mainly) digital user and customer experiences.”
UX is not there to set the brand vision of the company, but instead and more importantly, it serves to understand and translate it into (mainly) digital user and customer experiences.
We asked Holger about what makes Frontify stand out. For him, being active in 13 markets brings with it its fair share of challenges, which is why E.ON’s design team has always found crossteam collaboration to be a complex landscape to navigate and organize. Frontify’s cloud solution has contributed to raising efficiency and transparency, and has brought a new level of ease to projects involving multiple teams. With a single source of truth in place, regular exchange among each stakeholder group can happen without the bottleneck or confusion of redundant toolstacks. Plus, access and governance restrictions can be set to ensure simple and clean workflows.
We asked Holger what makes Frontify stand out. For him, having design teams from different markets collaborate has always proved to be challenging. Frontify’s cloud solution has contributed to raising efficiency and transparency and has brought a new level of ease to projects involving diverse teams and different stakeholder groups. Frontify also helped E.ON say goodbye to static PDF guidelines that often interfere with user experience and the design process at large.
According to Holger, one major use case of E.ON’s environment on Frontify is being able to easily document UI components in the front-end where these are directly published and made accessible to all users. This makes maintenance of the guideline more efficient, helps users find assets within E.ON’s brand space and increases brand engagement across the whole company.
Whatever sits on Frontify is the standard and reference for all marketing and communications activities across E.ON. What has been true for UX is also true for the brand: our brand guidelines are always up-to-date and they’re easy to use – to share and to collaborate on. And if the users are happy, the brand is happy.
According to Holger, one major use case of E.ON’s environment on Frontify is being able to easily document UI components in the front-end where these are directly published – and ultimately, made accessible for all users within a few clicks. Here, components sit directly and seamlessly within the main guideline alongside images, logos, color codes, and everything else that E.ON’s brand encompasses. This not only makes the maintenance of the guideline easier, it also means that all users find exactly what they’re looking for within E.ON’s brand space. The results? Stronger consistency, greater efficiency, and above all, more brand engagement company-wide.
E.ON’s brand is ready for the future and prepared for any new brand challenges ahead. With Frontify, E.ON can rest assured that consistency in design and brand across the company is in good hands as it continues to optimize on the design process, adapt with the world, and express its brand to the fullest.