Piaggio Fast Forward is built on the idea that design comes first. The company is best known for its flagship gita product — a revolutionary cargo-carrying robot that follows people wherever they need to go. Like its parent company Piaggio and its iconic Vespa scooters, Piaggio Fast Forward aims to build the future with groundbreaking, inclusive products.

The gita robot can carry up to 40 pounds of cargo, so walking is always an easy choice. The robot uses dynamic following technology that eliminates the need for controllers or programming, making gita easy to use and ideal for both personal and business applications.

Design is reflected in every aspect of gita: from the robot’s sleek curves, to the intuitive mobile app, to the engaging marketing and social media content. As design manager at Piaggio Fast Forward, Jerry Ding incorporates design-led thinking into all aspects of the business.

“The user experience should be central to everything we do,” says Ding. “That’s why we get the design team involved in the early stages of development for everything from packaging to the website to product development. We work with other teams to navigate ideas and develop ways to make these innovative experiences more intuitive for customers.”

The five-person internal design team touches every department of Piaggio Fast Forward and it needs to produce all types of digital and physical designs. By taking advantage of the collaborative capabilities of Adobe Creative Cloud for teams, the design team stays connected to keep branding and customer experiences consistent.

“Adobe Creative Cloud for teams has always had useful apps, but it has evolved over the years to also have really incredible sharing and collaboration capabilities,” says Ding. “Our team is building upon it to work more efficiently, no matter where our designers are located.”

Efficient redesign with interactive prototypes

The Piaggio Fast Forward design team works with a wide range of Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign for print and digital creative content, as well as Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects for video content. In recent years, Adobe XD has become the go-to app for all types of experience design. With simple drag-and-drop operations, designers can quickly drag reusable components into place, copy elements and rearrange or resize content to display across any size screen.

With Adobe XD, designers aren’t just creating flat screens. They’re developing dynamic, interactive prototypes that can be published online and shared with any stakeholders for review. Reviewers open the prototype in their browsers where they can click and scroll through the screens, open menus and view transitions designed to look and feel just like the final experience. This leads to more detailed and accurate feedback.

When the design team started working on the website redesign, they wanted to make sure that the website would address all of the concerns for different stakeholders such as customer support, marketing and leadership. Working with Adobe XD simplified reviews by allowing designers to share the latest prototype with all stakeholders at the same time, collect feedback and iterate in real time. When it came time to hand off to developers, designers used the Share for Development feature to generate Design Specs in Adobe XD that included the designs and associated resources in one link.

Graphic designer Ludo Cestarelli built a design system of standard web components in Adobe XD and shared it using Creative Cloud Libraries with the other designers. This design system helped streamline website design even further by allowing designers to quickly iterate on page designs by adding new components with a click.

“With Adobe XD and Creative Cloud Libraries, I can design individual web pages up to 50% faster,” says Cestarelli. “If I need to add a popup to a page, it’s just a matter of dragging a component into place and I get the right borders and dimensions every time.”

Maintaining consistent branding company-wide

The design team maintains and shares Creative Cloud Libraries with employees across the company to help ensure more consistent design, messaging and branding. The brand library contains only the latest approved logos, fonts, colours and other brand elements. Employees throughout the company can access the brand library to quickly find up to date brand guidelines and assets, without needing to spend time emailing designers for the right files.

“The best thing about Creative Cloud Libraries is that they can be used in any Adobe Creative Cloud app,” says Cestarelli. “Whether I’m building an email in Adobe XD or redesigning the user manual in Adobe InDesign, I can use the same library. It helps us nicely tie together print and digital.”

Weekly messaging for customers

Every week, the design team works with marketers to create cross-channel collateral connected around a theme. The weekly messaging typically includes a blog post, two emails and several social media posts, each linking to the other to drive engagement. Adobe Creative Cloud apps are used to create every piece of content. Designers edit photographs for social media with Photoshop, while Illustrator is used to design customised graphics and packaging. As video becomes more important to the company’s social media efforts, Premiere Pro and After Effects are also used more frequently by designers.

“We’ve found that over the last year, video posts on Instagram saw 139% higher engagement that static posts,” says Cestarelli. “It’s one thing to see a still photo of a gita, but it’s completely different to see a video of a gita automatically following someone and carrying their packages.”

Piaggio Fast Forward delivers its email campaigns through HubSpot. While the design team previously created emails using HubSpot templates, the team switched to Adobe XD for fast, responsive email template creation.

“We use the same web design principles to create a responsive email in Adobe XD. We share the design with our developer, he opens it in his browser and copies the code into HubSpot,” says Cestarelli. “It’s so fast and easy, we can spend more time creating tests or adjusting calls-to-action, which has helped us increase open rates by 1.22% and increase click through rates by 2.3%.”

Exploring new stories around gita

Piaggio Fast Forward is expanding the types of stories it tells around gita, particularly in the business space, to help customers better envision the many ways that gita can help them be more productive. The company currently has pilots running in hospitals, airports and hotels where gita assists workers or helps with contactless delivery.

The next step for Piaggio Fast Forward involves bringing together its three websites under one umbrella: the Piaggio Fast Forward corporate site, the gita product site and the Piaggio Fast Forward for business site. With one portal, customers will no longer need to flip between sites to find all of the information that they need.

“As our content needs grow, Adobe Creative Cloud for teams will help us efficiently keep up with demand while keeping branding aligned so that we can continue to create the best customer experiences possible,” says Ding.

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