Redesign of www.mintshot.co.nz

About a year ago, 3 mates launched an innovative concept for a ‘world first’ business idea which aimed to reward Kiwi’s for interacting with New Zealand’s best brands. The web site was www.mintshot.co.nz and it got off to a rather explosive start! (watch the video here http://www.mintshot.co.nz/about-us).

Recently Mintshot were looking to make some signifcant changes to their site and enlisted the help of RND Group to develop the systems and programming as well as ourselves, Martian Design & Interactive, to put the creative together and build the front end.

Nick and the team from Mintshot had a pretty clear vision for what they wanted to achieve with their new site. Build the Mint Shop, increase the value of the Mint dollar, introduce new games and much much more … so after an initial meeting we got to work putting the wireframes together.

The whole process spanned about 3 to 4 months and during that time we were responsible for the look and feel of the majority if the website, creating the html for the site as well as creating all the flash based components and user interaction.

One of the really interesting parts of this project was putting together Mintshot’s new Instant Win game. The concept is quite simple, choose a point on a map where the prize is hiding and if you click on it, you win it. Again we developed all the imagery, built the flash game and worked closely with RND Group to hook the game into the all knowing brain that manages the Instant Win system. Lots of fun and since going live that game has generated massive interest.

The Mintshot redesign was a great project to be involved with and we’re certainly looking forward to working with Nick and team in the future … perhaps for Mintshot version 3 ;)

As a side note, the three parties involved in this project were all located in different cities. Mintshot in Auckland, RND Group in Wellington and ourselves in Tauranga. We kept a tight schedule of conference call style meetings using Skype as well as using some great web based tools which gave us visibility over the entire project … Basecamp for project management, Unfuddle for bug tracking and Harvest for time tracking. These tools are very affordable and really make it easy to keep on top of projects. With a good broadband connection, the right tools and lots of coffee, distance need not be a hurdle anymore.