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SME & Large Corporate 2001-2012
Sapient, London - Senior Manager User Experience
2001-04
3.5 years with Sapient taught me a huge amount about the business of running an agency and the value of strong project and account management. I worked with some truly exceptional creative people who had been gathered from all over the world to form Sapients XMOD (Experience Modelling) team in the city of London.
Sapient in 2001 were a young energetic US company transitioning from being a client/server outfit to an agency that wanted to seize the internet. At that time the web was exclusively dial-up, WAP was the design environment for mobile, tablets and smart phones as categories just didn’t exist and the first iPod was about to be released with the form-factor of an electric blanket control. Our vision as a UX team far exceeded the technology and I believe Sapients UX practices reflected the best in the world.
Sapient’s experience design team embodied the specialisms of research, information architecture, content and visual design. T-shaped skill-sets were a concept that had yet to arrive and working within these tight specialisms led to really high quality outputs that were neither fast nor cheap.
I worked across sectors, variously in travel, telco, health and finance. At the time the telcos and the handset manufacturers thought they were the rightful owners of the internet, something that they didn’t let go of until around 2010. I also worked on the ill-fated NHS electronic care records system, which was a smart idea that became a political hot potato. However it did teach me a lot about the complexity of the NHS as I shadowed staff through primary, secondary and tertiary care. Some of the highlights were wearing scrubs to attend surgical procedures and shadowing GPs through their clinics. For me the most intriguing work was in the City where I spent months working on Goldman Sachs trading floor, getting my head around derivatives trading so that my team could design a new trading desk that presented information in a more readily manageable ways - know-how I then took onto the BP energy trading floor.
I really thrived on these opportunities to apply psychology to solving complex design problems. (I wrote these words at the time). So much so that I picked up the finance thread several years later.
OD2 & Nokia Music, Bristol - Product Director Music Service
2004 - 08
Vodafone Group - Dusseldorf & London - Senior Manager User Experience
2008-11
I joined Vodafone’s web innovation team in Dusseldorf in 2008 as a freelancer and entered a fantastically creative environment composed of inspiring people recruited from all over world to help Vodafone define the future of on-line digital.
Social was becoming ubiquitous, the iPhone had established the new category of smart phone and the mobile web was emerging as a mature experience with loads of potential.
No-one knew what was next and my job was to work in a team defining and inventing that. I became a permanent member of staff after 6 months and located to the London Group HQ. Over the next 2.5 years I worked on a range of shared and self-started projects developing and prototyping concepts, proving them with users and developing business cases to sell them into the business.
I became fascinated by the potential of co-designing with consumers and developed a methodology to allow Vodafone to scale this approach through the business. (I wrote these words at the time).
Finally in 2011 Vodafone also realised they were not the natural owners of the internet, and after a couple of difficult product launches (Vodafone 360 in particular) they let go of the ambition and re-distributed the team through the business, at which point I returned to agency life in Bristol..
OD2 led the charge on music downloads at a time when downloading 3meg (the size of a track) took about three minutes. They offered a white-label streaming and downloading service to big brands like Coca-Cola and MSN and were owned by Peter Gabriel amongst others. Their interface was horrible and by 2004 the whole experience needed a serious re-think.
I got the job as their first product manager (a great step for a UX specialist) and spent three years learning about the music industry, as well as the world of licensing and product management. As product manager I was able to re-design the service so it presented something customers could both use and want. I also developed an innovation road map to keep the service moving forward and inspire the company as well as new clients (and as it turned out, new owners).
I redefined the user experience of the product with my design team, but I also redefined the proposition. After running a six month study investigating what people do if you give them unlimited access to streaming music (which they choose, an important licensing point) I identified consistent patterns of behaviour that allowed me to price and launch the world’s first unlimited streaming music service as a subscription model.
Described in the Swedish newspapers as ‘better than drugs’ this service inspired Spotify. We moved the service to feature phone where it was also a world first - it's hard to overstate how astonishing it was in 2007 to be able to listen to music, on demand, through the phone.
I had established that the experience of music, *not ownership* was going to drive the music industry and I started taking tough decisions to move the proposition towards a pureplay streaming service.
The transition was interrupted by Nokia who bought OD2 in 2009 to set up Nokia Music. Suddenly my title got bigger, I had a global team, a global mandate and a stack of complexity around hand-sets and networks, it should have been brilliant. But after 6 months Nokia decided they didn't agree the future was in streaming music and asked me to to re-focus on downloads and file ownership. With such a fundamental mis-match in product vision I opted to leave Nokia to work with Vodafone as a freelancer.
History showed that streaming was the way forward, but Nokia had spent millions defining a proposition that locked music downloads to handsets at time when the iPhone was just being launched, it failed and NokiaMusic disappeared shortly after the Microsoft acquisition.
My background in UX and behavioural science enabled me to confidently undertake research into consumption and pricing models and introduce UX best practice that radically enhanced the customer experience.
I'm pretty certain that owning a product you are passionate about is one of the best jobs in the world !
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