Experience Design Consultant
August 2013 - May 2016
In 2013 I took advantage of my UK ancestry visa and travelled to London. Over nearly 3 years I was fortunate enough to work on many high profile UK and European brands in intense consulting engagements, mostly through the highly condensed and pressurised ThoughtWorks 'Inception' format.
Amnesty International | The Co-operative Group | British Telecom | Barclays Bank | Sky Gaming | Hepsiburada
The Co-operative Group. Manchester.
Traveling to Manchester for a 3 week Inception was a thrill with back-to back-to-back days spent with a crack team of 7 rotating consultants where we only planned workshops a day in advance. This was super intense with all day spent facilitating, while nights were filled with retrospective synthesis, forward planning and prepping for the next day.
There were a bunch of experience focussed workshops for me to plan and facilitate. Ultimately the collaborative discovery manifested a vision for digitising The Co-op's rewards program, a program that had been operating for years in a traditional manual in-store experience with physical mailout coupon redemption.
My main physical design outputs were a service map, supported by a prototype which detailed the end-to-end journey including offline and online touchpoints. Our proposal, which included a backlog of business, technical and design epics that were story-mapped and prioritised, was taken up by the business as a program of work in their organization wide digital transformation.
I planned and facilitated workshops with the clients to map out the as-is end to end service, so that I could then process that and envision a to-be prototype. The as-is service map was presented to the C-level suite of execs to expose the painpoints (business and consumer) and expose the need for digital transformation.
Sky Gaming. Leeds.
I was brought in to help identify innovation opportunities and ideas to be scoped for an experimentation/growth program across the products, and bake in Agile experience practices across the Spotify Tribe model adopted for their suite of products - Vegas, Bingo, Casino, Poker.
Innovation. Aside from the usual workshops - customer empathy maps, journey mapping, lean canvass etc. - the most valuable output was from a series of innovation workshops I ran using Jonny Schneider's idea capture cards. We were able to generate 100+ ideas which was distilled and translated in to 6 epics, 42 features and 72 stories.
Customer archetypes. Providing a clear articulation and shared understanding of the Sky Gaming consumer segments critical. Through workshops we collaboratively defined the segment hypotheses, then I lead an effort to validate those consumer buckets with real users and data captured off the 4 production sites - cross platform - then ran a second validation effort to capture and validate data via an alternate method using a CRM mailout. In the end we had a fully vetted set of archetypes that sat across the products that can be used for design, marketing campaign targeting, research recruitment etc.
Innovation ideas. The ideas are reframed as experiments to be prioritized as part of the Lean Value Tree which then feeds the hypothesis driven UX process - see below.
Customer archetypes. Multiple stakeholder workshops were held across various business units. The archetypes were validated with consumers .
IDEAL UX (Insights Driven Experiments, Lean & Agile) is a process I envisaged that sits between and connect the business vision with the delivery track. The Lean Value Tree ultimately manifests ideas for experiments that then feed the IDEAL UX hypothesis driven design process.
The principle underpinning this UX model is to pull the design track out of delivery and connect it to the business objectives in a practical way. IDEAL UX feeds delivery, rather than trying to be a part of it.
Barclays Bank. Northampton & Berlin.
As an experienced Agile and Lean UX practitioner, my consulting engagement was to enable, coach and mentor a combined client-side and ThoughtWorks team in Agile experience design within a software delivery project.
Working out of the Northampton innovation office for product release in Germany, the project was to take a traditional cumbersome loan application process including physical documents and wet signature, and digitize it with an online service including a digital signature.
I set in place the rituals, methods and design craft practices including hypothesis driven design and design sprints while leading the strategic design direction, tactical solution design and bridging the 3rd party tech owners with engineering and design team.
Activities included a user testing effort I lead in Berlin, Germany.
British Telecom. London and Adastral Park (Suffolk).
Working with a savant data scientist from BT's innovation lab in Adastral Park on a process modeling and data processing tool was incredibly challenging, and mind bending at times.
Trusting in the UX process of solid IA, contextual enquiry, customer archetyping, content and data mapping, usability heuristics etc. gave me a good enough understanding of the tool to envisage a new user experience.
In the end, a super technical engagement turned out to be experience-lead, as it's design that translated obtuse data sets in a niche segment adopted by specialist users in to something that's useful and usable.
The Inception team was able to showcase a design vision and research plan, a tech approach, a release plan and backlog of stories that was ready to invoke a delivery project.
Amnesty International. London.
Myself and a BA planned an Inception with series of all day discovery workshops over a week with a joint TW and Amnesty team.
After facilitating the experience focussed workshops, my recommendation was to redefine Amnesty International's global navigation including a new IA and UI design to be rolled out to their global website network.
After the Inception, the proposal was then taken up by the business and a delivery team was assembled to take the work forward.
Example mini-inception plan. Every session was inclusive and collaborative in a physical workshop format.