Splendid has forged a strong relationship with Muse, working directly with the band, management and label to create highly innovative online and off-line products.

Prior to Splendid's formation in 2003, the company's founders - Paul, Alex and Dan - had a wealth of experience working with the major UK record labels. They had produced work for artists such as rock and roll legend Roy Orbison, Scottish/American rock outfit Garbage, Northern Irish rock band Ash (Bafta nominated for the digital campaign for the Platinum Album 'Free all Angles') along with All Saints, Catatonia, Westlife and New Order amongst others.

The brief

Create a new website for the award winning stadium rock act Muse. The site must remain live for a number of years, supporting the continually changing content of an album campaign; video, audio, news and events information for example.

Creatively the site needed to evolve from the work produced for the 'Absolution' campaign as many of the themes from the previous album were to be expanded on in the new musical offering from the band.

What we did

It is difficult to apply the full UCD process to a client of this type, but neither Splendid nor the band and management wanted to compromise on creativity or the development process. Splendid therefore embarked on a series of activities that would help surface the band and management's thoughts regarding the structure and purpose of the site, the themes that they wanted to develop creatively and the technologies Splendid would explore to enhance the user experience.

The resulting site is a great example of how Splendid draw on their collective experience to work through a series of complex issues, the output of which forms the basis for the next phase of the project.

In the subsequent 10 weeks Splendid designed a site with the following specification in mind:

• Create a graphically rich, highly impactful user experience using video and audio
• Develop a flexible CMS that would enable the administrator to link to related content internally and externally
• Develop a modular presentation layer developed in Adode Flash
• Utilise the streaming capabilities of Adobe Flash
• Create a set of tools to allow users personalise the UI, to add video and audio, photos and text to the site (UGC) as well as developing an area specifically controlled by the fans (MYMU)
• Create a mechanism for easily porting the content to other website or devices

Splendid began with interaction design and prototyping of the interface; simple wire fames that informed the user as to what content and functionality would appear on each page template.

Once the band and management were happy with these basic page flows Splendid were able to implement the visual design and development phase. The creative team had already begun a process of developing the visual language that would form the foundations of the page designs. These styles were then applied to the wire frames produced previously.

In a parallel work stream the developers had begun re-formatting the information from the previous database in preparation for porting it to the new CMS. A simple method of dynamically produced XML was developed to communicate between the MySQL database and the presentation layer.

The developers implemented the presentation layer in Adobe Flash and Flash Streaming Server. This was considered to be the optimum method of delivery for a site that was using such a large level of streaming video and audio. The creative team designed beautiful crafted animations to be displayed as the user navigated through the site. These animations were optimised for low bandwidth users so the load times would not disrupt their browsing experience.

Since the launch of the site in 2006, Splendid have been commissioned to produce a number of supporting digital campaigns to promote the band's single releases. Splendid also designed the artwork used for the HAARP CD/DVD release (March 2008) and all associated marketing (posters, press adverts etc).

Results

The site consistently receives a high level of traffic and the band's database rose significantly after site re-launch. The band also won Best Rock Artist at the BT Digital Music Awards in 2004, 2006 and 2007 in recognition of their strong online presence.