BuzzMyVideos :: Mobile CMS, UX, UI and Build

BuzzMyVideos is a leading MCN with over 5000 YouTube channels. I reported directly to the owners (two ex-YouTube executives). The majority of work I was tasked with involved setting up and managing a new mobile arm for the business that enabled their creators (including Roberto Saviano) to have their own apps on both the Google Play and Apple’s App Store. The apps were targeting the fans of the creators and contained a social feed with timeline-based posts from Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, a chat room, direct messaging with the creator and exclusive CMS-powered content and media not available elsewhere. My duties included planning and AB testing the UX, designing the base UI’s and creating detailed wire-frames and user journeys. I also setup an App CMS / Management suite on the Google Cloud and built a range of hybrid Mobile apps for individual Creators (JS / CSS3 / Rest API-based). I was also responsible for the day to day management of two offshore Mobile Development Agencies and built their new wordpress-based website.

Hogarth Worldwide :: Freelance Technical Director

I was recruited to assist when their Technical Lead departed and just before a new Head of Digital took over. My role was very varied and included:
  • Working on apps, websites, online tools and digital display advertising for the likes of HSBC, Santander, Dior, BetFair and British American Tobacco.
  • Assisted outsourcing the majority of their development work to their rapidly growing network of owned off shore development teams.
  • Assisting HR to recruit the right fulltime employees (developers and QA) and project-based freelancers (Mobile, PHP + FrontEnd) via the ‘right’ channels and subsequently interviewing them.
  • Helping align the design team with frameworks (Bootstrap) and principles (Mobile First) to ensure the minimum friction between London-based design and offshore development.
  • Using WordPress as both a CMS, Mobile App Foundation and rapid prototyping tool to assist conveying complex sites and solutions with the minimum of time
  • Assisting the trans-creation team (localization) in automating the translations of large Drupal, WordPress and custom CMS based sites
  • Working alongside client services to assist managing clients expectations
  • Creating a MediaSpec Hub that aggregated all the media (banner) spec from publishers and
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  • Gave significant advice on internal technical projects like Zadar, SocialStream and Dep (a highly customized version of Jira)
  • Ultimately owning all internal technical decisions relating to both projects and how they are built and how both developers and QA work
  • Extensive working with and managing of offshore teams based in Romania, India and Africa to build apps, websites and online tools
  • Writing technical documentation on sites, builds and apis and Helping PMs with briefs, SOW’s and Functional Specs.
  • Managing the entire multilingual build of the new Hogarth Worldwide website and all their global satellite office
  • Instigating the use of Atlassians HipChat and GitHub Enterprise to both increase accountability and visibility, and streamline the development process
*Hogarth Worldwide is one of the fastest growing companies in the UK. Acting as the production hub for fellow WPP agencies (JWT, Ogilvy, Grey) and its own clients (Nike, HSBC, Burberry, Dior, HTC etc) its rapid success has seen it grow from 12 – 2000 employees in just 5 years, with over 18 offices around the world.

BAT :: Android and IOS Social Location App

Whilst at Hogarth I was required to build a multi-language location based app for BAT. It used a wealth of APIs including Gigya for social login, GoogleMaps for Maps, Foursquare for locations and others for age verification etc. The idea was to show users the best places to smoke in specific cities like London, Zurich and Seoul. It was built for both Android and IOS and i was involved at every stage from numerous meetings with client, the UX, the UI, the recruitment of the wider team, code reviews and the occasional rewrite. The backend platform was built upon WordPress and utilised a clever MongoDB based API, it was hosted on an Amazon EC2 server that i also setup.

Hewlett Packard :: Android Customisation & Launcher

Whilst lead Creative Technologist at Native Design, the integrated design agency, I was required to oversee the technical and development aspects of three new Nexus devices for HP – a 7, 8 and 10 inch tablet. The majority of the project was the modification of the Android platform to make it more aligned with the HP brand and improve certain core experiences through its customisation. This fascinating, yet uncommon area of Android, included rewriting and redesigning core aspects of the Andrid core including First Boot, Standard Boot, Lock Screen, Home Screen, Widget, App Drawer and System Fonts, Colours and Effects. Many interactions had to be done as the fine tuning of aspects like animations were critical to the products performance with the aim of producing the best android experience without impacting the quality of the HP brand at any stage, especially on a new product range. These Android powered devices had a range of hardware specifications and each experience had to be tailored and optimised accordingly. HP had a global team working on the hardware and compliance aspects so we had almost daily contact and numerous face to face meetings with HP’s senior management throughout the project. The project was run in an agile, sprint-based environment that utilised both GitHub and HipChat.

Bowers and Wilkins :: UI, UX & Mobile Applications

Whilst working as the lead Creative Technologists at Native Design I was involved in numerous projects for and client meetings with their client Bowers and Wilkins (B&W) the leading speaker and headphone manufacturer. My work is under a very strict NDA and the products will not be out for another year or so. I am permitted to say that the products both involved JukeBlox and BluetoothLE and services such as Spotify, one of B&W’s lead partners, AirPlay by Apple and both Android and IOS Mobile applications.

SFR – Home Hub (£2 billion of value)

SFR Stargate from Native on Vimeo.

Whilst Natives Lead Creative Technologist I worked for SFR, Frances leading telephone, mobile and broadband provider (part of Vivendi the group). The projects I was involved in ranged from the research, design and build of their next generation set-top box featuring plenty of ground-breaking entertainment and home-orientated technologies accessed via an advanced HTML5 UI. The majority of my work was based on the User Interface and User Experience side and involved numerous tasks including Prototyping UIs, investigating technologies, recruiting the necessary IOS, Android and HTML5 developers and regularly visiting France to discuss and present the progress with the client SFR. In addition i was also responsible for evaluating and improving their range of cloud based business SAS services. Please note the images displayed are not the products created as they are under strict NDA and will not be released until 2016.

Dove :: TV Advert to Shopping Basket via Mobile

Whilst Technical Director at Billington Cartmell i spent considerable time assisting the Innovation Team in cutting edge, first to market solutions. One of these was a hybrid concept bringing together a range of pre-existing technologies to produce a compelling synergy. The idea was simple, watch a TV advert for something you like, hold up your phone, identify the video in real-time (far quicker that reading an audio file via Shazzam for instance) and trigger a response or ultimately send the item seamlessly to your preferred supermarkets shopping basket for your next online shop. I was responsible for writing the technical specifications, researching the hi-tech partners technologies and SDKs, writing the scope of work and liaising with the proposed client, Unilever on the matter.

Panasonic :: 'Flag Tags' Facebook and Mobile App

  Panasonic is the official worldwide Olympic partner in the Audio Video Equipment Category, and whilst working as Technical Director of Brave I was responsible for technically overseeing their 2012 Olympics campaign, Flag Tags. Flag Tags allowed people around the world to show support for their country in the London 2012 Games by projecting a map onto the users face, applying a displacement filter and allowing it to be creatively edited to produce unique and personal effects. These could then be shared (‘Share the Passion’ was the strap line) and / or submitted to your nations gallery for a Flag Tag country leader board. The campaign started within Facebook as a Flash / Php App and due to its unprecedented success it was then ported to mobile for both iOS and Android. Over 50,000 people globally took part with no additional supportive advertising proving the viral success of a succinct idea. As Technical Director my input included working out the back-end, CDN and server infrastructure, researching and experimenting with the flash developer the best way to achieve the displaced flag effect without it looking ‘stuck on’, selecting the appropriate third party for the mobile build and assisting with QA throughout.

British Olympic Association / Team GB :: Technical Direction

I was at KitKattNohr Digitas, a top global Digital agency that’s part of the Publicis Group, to bring technical leadership to a range of private and public websites for the London 2012 Olympics, Team GB and the British Olympic Association (BOA). I am heavily in all areas of the Olympics based projects, from board level discussions with KNDs new merger-driven management team (Paul Kitkatt / Mark Nohr), to working with and overseeing creative’s, writing business and technical documentation, helping manage budgets and project burn, dealing daily with the client on a range of technical and non-technical issues, managing self appointed and client appointed third-parties, recruiting and managing developers, both in house and remote, and even managing to find the time to write some great code and offer inspirational leadership! The 6 websites are all built using Drupal 7 and leverage the advantages of a multisite Drupal configuration. Additional modules, including Organic Groups, Views, Mollum, WYSIWYG and Backup, are used and great care was taken to ensure the stability and maturity of these modules before signing off their acceptance within the build. The responsive grid-based theme framework, Omega, was chosen for the project predominately for its native support of HTML5 but also because of its liquid design principals and graceful degradation. Traditional (‘waterfall’), agile and prototyping build processes all used within the project and all the project management was done via MS Project and Jira.

The websites built for the Olympics were:

  1. New main website for the London2012 Olympics (www.olympics.org.uk)
  2. A secure Athlete Accreditation Site
  3. Campaign Micro site for ‘Join Our Greatest Team’ campaign that also featured advanced Flash
  4. Private partner-facing Olympic Pledge site for all Olympic sponsors employees
  5. A community and forum based site for the friends and families of Olympians
  6. A video driven ‘welcome pack’ site for UK athletes who have been selected

* All sites had an accessibility implementation of Double A, and graded browser support to include IE6. ** Mobile and IOS support was also included.

Below is a brief summary of my work:

  • Heavily client-facing. I was the single technical contact point for the multiple projects, my role included the presenting of ideas, board level discussions and multiple technical and business-related meetings
  • Researched and agreed the requirements for a bespoke sports based CMS for both web and screen based (offices, Olympic village etc) content during the 2012 Olympics that enabled two communication from athletes to the public and the public back to the athletes
  • Conception of ideas with creative’s and identifying technologies to enhance the sites functional creativity and overall stickiness (like using databases to create rich immersive comment driven digital walls in the athletes village)
  • Third party technology provider discussion, evaluation and leadership including ePlayer, Movergy, GBSports TV, InfoStrada, YouTube, AnchorFan, Gigya and Getty
  • Installation, configuration and evaluation of social networking and DMS technologies (open source and commercial) for use within the campaign elements of the site.
  • Technical meetings with other relevant organisations  like the IOC and Locog and sponsors like BP, Mini, Cadburys and TechnoGym
  • The facilitating of widget-based API, MRSS and RSS based data sources for real-time content
  • Dealing with Rackspace, Amazon and Akamai and identifying and arranging suitable cloud servers, load balancing, content delivery networks and security
  • Full content audits of legacy Olympic sites by Haymarket and Cisco.
  • Mitigating against loss of data, establishing ownership of the  different types of data, the selection and installation of SSL and arranging for Penetration Testing by a ethical hacking organisation
  • Writing test scripts and organising internal and remote QA
  • UX, Wire-Framing, Mind Mapping and Prototyping

In addition other work I achieved for KitKattNohr Digitas includes:

  • Helped instigate process and working methodology within KitKattNohr Digitas by meeting with all key directors and identifying concerns (Accounts, Planning, Project Management, Creative and Tech)
  • Interviewing and hiring of technical and front end staff including high-level Drupal developers
  • Working closely with Graphic Designers to ensure maximum leverage of liquid designs, the responsive grid and limit ‘over design’ at early stages of the project

Saatchi & Saatchi :: Technical Director

I was contracted by Saatchi and Saatchi’s in London to direct them in ‘bringing Digital to the heart of the agency’ after the demise of Saatchi Interactive. It was my responsibility to run all London-based Digital work, brainstorm with the creative’s (mainly with the global creative director), assist the Head of Operations’ in sorting process, scope and Digital project management. I was also responsible for building a scalable supply network of third party companies that Saatchi’s could utilise on specific Digital projects, recruiting both freelancers and permanent staff and vetting all client pitches from a creative and technical perspective. The London-based work I oversaw included Visa, T-Mobile, Atlantis, Starbucks, Cadburys, NSPCC, Axa, General Mills, the Marine Stewardship Council and the rebuilding of Saatchis website.