We’re going to need a bigger boat.
Intelsat operates the largest integrated space and terrestrial network in the world. We’re talking about six different global business units serving literally millions of customers. And how was it telling that story? With complicated static diagrams that attempted to cram the entire story into single slides. Obviously, something had to change—and it wasn’t going to be easy.

The whole story? Which version?

Before we could devise a better way of telling the Intelsat story, we had to understand it. And our stakeholders had to agree on one source of truth. So began months of discovery and deliberation with client teams, in which we painstakingly went over every aspect of what they do, top-to-bottom. Which was… a lot. We asked questions. Then we asked questions about those questions. Then we questioned the answers, until we finally had a group of ecosystem diagrams describing the bones of the business. Only then were we ready to actually start thinking about how we would build the thing.

All hands on deck.

Initially, the ask was clear: The team wanted an interactive experience. Then the caveats came rolling in: It had to be self-contained so you wouldn’t need connectivity to use it (but lightweight enough to load seamlessly). It had to be self-led, but also used as a sales tool. It had to include specific use cases, link out to complementary assets, be easily updated… the list went on. But before we could get to any of that, we had to decide on a look and feel.

“Why is everything blue?”

Intelsat had a style guide, but we would have to break new ground. General aesthetic was half of that effort. The other half was devising a UI experience that made sense backwards, forwards, up and down. No matter where the viewer dropped in, they had to be able to navigate to what they needed. Luckily, a lot of experimentation and advanced leg work gave us a great starting point on how to express complicated ideas in visuals that were easy to understand, and felt true to the brand.

UI so beautiful to me.

Knowing that the experience was most commonly going to be shown at trade shows on kiosks, sales team laptops, and other desktop-sized environments, it was possible to pack quite a lot in and use the screen real estate accordingly.

But one snag along the way developed—in a quickly-approaching use case, we learned that some portrait-orientation kiosks were running the trade show experience. On the surface, this meant the responsiveness of the experience needed to be a bit more flexible, but seeing the kiosks in person also made us realize we needed some very specific renders of our 3D environments—allowing the UI to flex in a way that worked best under these odd conditions.

A developer dilemma.

There are many ways we could have approached this project’s development. In the past, we’d used WebGL for similar projects to render 3D objects on the fly, controlled by JavaScript. However, this can be both limiting in terms of support for specific types of lighting, and very time consuming for development. Taking a page from another project, we decided to get the best of both worlds by combining pre-rendered video assets that gave us the exact look we wanted with a JavaScript-controlled experience that could seamlessly jump between rendered assets and time stamps—speeding up the process and making changes easier.

Three, two, one…

When the dust had settled, it was incredibly exciting to see all the hard work come together in an experience that felt fresh, easy to understand, and highly unique. Intelsat’s competition didn’t have anything that could touch this, and knowing our clients looked great—well, that gave us indescribable satisfaction.