Clients And Case Studies

Over the last 17 years working with ICT in design, research, usability, ecommerce and consultancy I have worked with:

• Corporates: Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, DTI, Keane UK, Lloyds TSB, Atkins Global, Catlin, Nortel
• Brands: Virgin Money, Virgin Books, Delia Smith, Myla, Paul Smith, London Zoo
• SMEs: Eland, Cucina Direct, Abbey Box Office, Virgin Experience Days
• Educational organisations: Brightside Trust, Nuffield Foundation, Script Factory
• Charities and non-profits: Kings Fund, RIBA, Carers.org, Advice Now
• Education: Royal College of Art, IPKO Centre (Kosova), Staffordshire University, ARTEC, Kingston University, University of Westminster

Eland Cables

Site SEO and usability consultancy: When Eland decided it was time to re-design their site so that it could be easily updated with a Content Management System I helped them create a site that outshines their competitors. When I first started working with Eland they only ranked for "eland" searches in Google. Within six months of working with me they had had orders from twelve new countries. 

Now Eland rank for so many industry related keywords it can be hard to keep up so we constantly monitor which keywords are the best for business and plan our content strategy to match. Some of Eland's best results as of Spring 2009 are...

electrical cable (#1)
electrical cables (#1)
yy cable (#1)
nyy cable (#1)
h07rn-f cable (#1)
h07rn-f (#1)
pilot cable (#1)
welding cable (#1)
h07rnf (#1)
pvc cable (#1)
h05vv-f (#1)
h01n2-d (#1)
aluminium cable (#1)
ct125 cable (#1)
6381tq cable (#1)
instrumentation cables (#1)
tri rated cables (#1)
bs6195 (#1)
2491x (#1)
cable supplier (#1)
fire cable (#1)
ct167 (#1)
earthing cables (#1)
6491b (#2)
armoured cables (#2)
steel wire armoured cable (#2)
aluminium cables (#2)
electrical cable specifications (#2)
sy cable (#3)
cable lugs (#3)
cw1308b (#3)
nyy-j (#3)
33kv cable (#3)
cable nyy (#3)

... and the list goes on!

Social Media Marketing: Throughout the process of creating a new site I have helped the marketing team to make the most effective use of all the technologies available to them running regular training and brainstorming sessions.

The Eland marketing team have helped shaped the functionalities of the Engagement Engine using it to make contact with potential customers in forums and blogs.

Jack Daniel's Barbecue Sauces

Development: The challenge with the Jack Daniel's project was the creation of a multi-language Content Management System (CMS) to share PDF recipes that use their sauces.

Nokia

Usability consultancy: The challenge was twofold. Firstly, to make visual recommendations that showed how to improve the usability of UK Nokia site and secondly to create design approaches that artfully enabled marketing campaigns to be integrated into the design of the site without affecting the usability.

We created numerous examples of improvements that could be made, from bare-bones wire-frames to full design mockups.

Delia Smith

Search Engine Optimisation: Contact us to find out how a few very simple changes to the Delia Smith site resulted in 50,000 new visitors to her site, month on month for over 6 months.

Refugee Council

Consultancy: Research about how a non-profit might best create a credible web presence for free (or at very low cost). We evaluated seven online applications and made recommendations based on ease-of-use, essential functionalities, extendability and overall design. Contact Us if you'd like advice on how to create a site "for free" that doesn't suck.

Londinium Coffee

Development / Social Media Consultancy: Reiss is a coffee guru startup making the best coffee I've ever tasted. This project needed the bootstrapping of an Ecommerce site (to begin sellling his fantastic coffee) and Social Media Marketing advice (to begin drumming up orders).

Wall Glamour

Social Media Marketing consultancy: Working with Rick over a number of meetings we designed and planned usability, SEO and marketing strategies that dramatically ramped his traffic and sales.

Marshall Arts

Development / Social Media Consultancy: The Marshall Arts challenge was to create a web gallery that "builds itself" based on their Excel stock spreadsheet. With hundreds of regulary changing images Marshall Arts needed an automatic way to update their gallery.

Lloyds TSB

Persuasion consultancy: Report evaluating competing banks information design strategies and making recommendations on how to make more sales with only small changes to the home page design.

Virgin Money

Persuasion consultancy: This consultancy was to offer ideas on how to improve their Customer Journeys so that more people completed the sign-up process successfully more often. We designed a customer-flow that aimed to always "tick their pyschological boxes" whichever route they took through the information.

Cucina Direct

Usability consultancy: When working on an ecommerce catalogue site that sent out thousands and thouands of product catalogues by mail. In meetings with the owner he let slip that two of the biggest pains in his company were dupes (duplicate people in his customer list) and incorrect data that required cleaning by hand. He boasted that their database developers had made improvements that had “removed 3 clicks” from the cleansing process.

A few changes to the order process and automation of the database update removed dozens of clicks making huge cost savings. Making a number of usability improvements to the registration form in the first place cut even more clicks. Cleaner data made the system easier to use, produced happier customers, less error prone and lead to far fewer dupes lurking in the system.

Kings Fund

Development / Training: When a large Heathcare non-profit came to me looking to create a project reporting system we developed a secure shared blog to share research news. The integrated wiki became a “knowledge repository” for Staff and we used various online diagram tools to create/share and annotate what where their “Customer Journeys” plans. Along the way, once of the lucky benefits for the project was discovering how Delicious tagging made working in a team (and from home) so much easier for them.

Catlins: Virtual Queuing

Usability consultancy: This was a pure usability consultancy project working with a London technology company in which we were asked to design a virtual queuing system for Catlins Underwriters at Lloyds of London (2004).The system had to be easy to use and adaptive because meetings rarely (if ever) run on time. The system used touch screens in the foyer to make appointments, plasma screens and web interface. Lloyds TSB wanted to maximise sales made from their homepage.I produced a detailed

Oracle: Think.com

The Think.com site is one of the largest online communities in the world, open only to kids and teachers. I worked in collaboration with Ultralab staff and the Oracle Education Research development team to create totally new online learning environments.The design of Think.com was based on my Spinalot project, a project which enabled me to work with Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino. 

Spinalot

Development / Research: Spinalot (1996) was a tool designed to help create online learning communities. It assumed all members had an identity, could create work and discussions, comment on each others work, share bookmarks and more.

Many community sites were created with this toolset and it became the starting point for the creation of Oracle’s Think.com and lead to me working with Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in Cupertino.

Virgin Books

At the OTHER media I lead the design for Virgin Books and created the strategy of trying to “out Google Amazon”. Amazon are wonderful if you know what you want but terrible if you don’t.

Within 6 months of the relaunch sales were up by 400% based on a simple approach of showing more products, more often and focusing on customers search terms, not on the product titles. 

Royal Institute of British Architects

The Royal Institute of British Architects only had a small budget to redesign their home page. RIBA departments were responsible for over 30 sites, each with a different look and feel, each with different hosting, authors and navigation.Other design companies pitched their designs but I had written simple tools to extract all the data from all their sites, keeping the complex structure intact.

This approach meant that in our pitch we could demonstrate all their sites being available for the first time with a unified look n feel and being edited using the OTHERmedia’s CMS, OTHERobjects.We won the gig and to reorganise the site we must have used 10 packets of Post It notes (the measure of many a fun project). 

Mr Blog: Core Education

In 2005 I spent 6 months in New Zealand working for Core-ed evangelising the use of open-source software and emerging tools of blogs and wikis etc. particularly in education.We kicked off many small experimental projects and gave presentations up and down the country, earning me the affectionate (if inaccurate) nickname Mr. Blog. I also learned to love the ukulele.