Principle designer
Lead Consultant - ThoughtWorks
Istanbul. December 2013 - December 2014
Hepsiburada is the Amazon of Turkey, and was the fastest growing e-commerce site in Europe. I joined an inception team for 2 weeks in Istanbul in December of '13 in what would turn out to be a year long engagement for me, and a once in a lifetime experience.

The e-commerce website final designs with mobile adaptation, and the new seller Marketplace experience. 

Our initial remit for the inception was to understand the complexity, scale and scope for creating an online Marketplace within the existing e-commerce website. The engagement was also a big play for ThoughtWorks who was looking to create a footprint in Turkey with an office in Istanbul. The stakes were high on both sides.
At the end of the inception I pulled an all nighter to create a prototype and present to the billionaire owner of the company. That one final design effort proved critical to winning the work.
Returning in January of '14, the project soon ballooned in to a program of work including the originally planned Marketplace, also a full tech replatforming, organizational transformation, Agile enablement, and, a full redesign of their online e-commerce website! 
I was one-out as the only designer for months and I cannot stress how huge an effort this turned out be, easily the most demanding and taxing of my career. Here are some key points; 
- Inception: Workshop facilitation. High level Service Design and prototyping.
- Release planning: Defining the MVP and ongoing experience roadmap and release strategy. 
- Introduced UCD to the company, starting with UX research and customer engagement.
- Introduced a mobile-first redesign to their desktop only e-commerce site. 
- Coached the clients on Lean, Design Thinking and Agile practices in a cross functional delivery team.
- Built a joint client-side and consultant design team, and worked all activities for the local hires.
- Embedded myself in the local community at multiple UX Design and Agile events and meetups.
- Service Design for their entire end-to-end service including merchant onboarding, customer support,  fulfillment and finance.

Using the large format design and printing technique. Here I'm with the billionaire owner, the company President, CTO, CIO, CFO, CMO, legal counsel, my thoughtWorks Program Manager.

The service map was a critical design output helping both the business stakeholders and the cross functional delivery team on the ground get across the full experience. This was the result of lots of contextual enquiry including visits to the fulfillment warehouse, customer support teams, onsite merchant interviews, user research, internal sessions with IT tech and business/product owners and the list goes on.
The website redesign
In parallel with the marketplace project and all leadership and UX activities, I was still responsible for the design direction of the new design. Here's a snapshot of some of the activities;
- An optimized taxonomy and IA with a new menu housed and a redesigned navigation.
- A new mobile adaptive rendering system and device strategy.
- Information design and logical in-page content groupings for categories, products and campaigns.
- A new design language and style for the site-wide visual uplift. This ended up being owned locally.
- Functional pattern design on desktop/mobile for components like the product page buy panel, rating & reviews, and the cart . 
- Behavioral and interaction design for modules like the homepage carousel and mobile menu pattern.
- Conducted the first ever company user testing sessions in lab that we created in-house. 
- User archetype definition and validation.
- Launched surveys off the site for CSAT and user recruitment drives for testing.
- Introduced data driven design with instrumentation baked in to each story as a data-first principle.
- Drove an experimentation mindset with A/B testing, beta opt ins and an MVP approach.

Homepage with exposed menu. From 20 categories to 9. A new IA and menu over a redesigned taxonomy on a fresh UI. The entire page had new structural definition and hierarchy to house the content for product and campaign groupings, augmented by the dynamic carousel (see above).

Product detail. The 'start of the conversion funnel' was a huge focus for optimisation. An exhaustive effort of research, design and validation manifested an increase in cart engagement and ultimately, higher conversion.

Given the enormity of the program and the tiny team we had there, to say we were super lean and Agile in our approach would be an understatement. I had never - and may never again - experience anything like the extreme pressures and high expectations in an at times hostile environment, in a very tumultuous foreign land. It was actually a real buzz. Despite that, we had an incredible local Turkish team to work with and while delivering under much duress along the way, we managed to have a lot of fun.

A ubiquitous sketch > wireframe > high fidelity image. In and of itself just redesigning the IA and a new navigation in a foreign language, with bespoke UI patterns and interaction models for desktop and mobile was a substantial ask, but this was one small piece of the giant puzzle.