GOOD PARTNERSHIPS
Working with the biggest and best brands around the world is a learning experience.
Developing partnerships that reinvent customer experiences and deliver innovative results is the only way to provide true value to each client.
Next generation of luxury automotive.
As a quintessentially British luxury brand, Bentley face competition from the booming EV market, an ever evolving luxury sector, and new cost-cutting eastern rivals whilst simultaneously competing with the rising price of hand crafted goods. Differentiation with all aspects of customer experience has never been more important.
An initial digital brand expression project was undertaken to conceptualise how multiple digital touch points should evolve over the next 10 years. Customer journey mapping and trend based research was combined with user insight to identify opportunity areas, which were then explored by a team of UX designers, visual creatives, and 3D artists who brought each moment to life in a series of videos.
Following the success of this first project, and with the imminent introduction of a new brand, the team was reassembled to help translate the overarching brand identity, completed by partner agency IPGX, into digital experience principles, design rules and pattern based recommendations that can be translated across multiple platforms.
Here until HIV and AIDS aren’t.
Pharma isn’t always known for innovation, thankfully ViiV Healthcare isn’t trying to fit into the crowd. Born out of a partnership between GSK and Pfizer in 2009, ViiV are determined to help end the HIV epidemic through a portfolio of 17 prescription medicines, improving global access to medication, and numerous community initiatives.
ViiV chooses to focus on holistic patient care, where drug innovations over the past 40 years have turned the ‘death sentence’ of HIV diagnosis into a manageable condition, little has been done to support the social and emotional turmoil of People Living with HIV (PLHIV).
Over the course of several years, numerous projects have been completed to help transform how ViiV understand and communicate with their audiences. The companies first segmentation for Healthcare Professionals was created from 100’s of research sources and validated through independent research, which led to the definition of a new CX Framework and rollout strategy.
Health, wealth, and personal financial wellness.
Mercer work with thousands of businesses to redefine the world of work, reshaping what retirement means for employees and unlocking real health improvements. Mercer’s varied products include pensions and tools to aid retirement, employee benefits to support health and wellbeing, and resources to support career growth.
Mercer Money is a specific financial wellness product, a multi-platform tool that provides access and management for Mercer pensions, but also extends it’s features through open banking to provide a complete view of each users’ wealth. Mercer asked us to review the current website and app and to provide insight into areas that offered a poor user experience, alongside new designs to optimise the design.
Data analysis, user research, and an iterative design / validation process was adopted to optimise the product across identified bottlenecks, such as the onboarding flow and dashboard page. The quality of insight and design revisions created has since spurred on additional projects to develop new features for Mercer.
Connecting Britains Smart Meter network
Most people aren’t aware of the DCC, nor the amazing potential of Great Britain’s data network that the company designs, rolls out, and manages every single day.
Much like pipes for water, the data network is an integral piece of infrastructure that will support future smart cities and move data in secure and effective ways. A great example of this is how DCC help transfer smart meter data from your home to suppliers - millions of times.
Through a complete design overhaul of their web presence, our team managed to create a future-fit space where engineers, regulators, and consumers alike can understand more about the DCC or get the help and support they need to keep the network rollout moving. Follow up projects to design data dashboards and a concept for an innovative mobile app continued to improve visibility of the brand and knowledge of the great work the company does.
Experience more than utility.
Serving fresh water and sewage services to 16 million households, whilst maintaining an archaic infrastructure, is a complex operations and engineering marvel. Maintaining a growing and diverse user base, with a dated website, and customers who have to use your service; is a challenge ready for experience innovation.
Starting with a competitive pitch process, where strategy, design, UX came together within Hugo & Cat to form a striking vision of the future
Following a deep immersion phase of business integration, stakeholder interviews and getting under the skin of company operations, we embarked on a discovery project to form a baseline of customer knowledge. Throughout this time I lead a team of UX designers through site audits, primary research and consolidation of knowledge into persona, data analysis and user journey maps.
Marketing the Island of Ireland to the world.
Tourism Ireland was formed to showcase the beauty of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland as a tourist destination. Their work results in millions of visitors to the island each year, travelling from all over the world to experience the history, culture, and epic Irish scenery.
My work with Tourism Ireland started many years ago, working on experience improvements to their global multi-language website, including new components, optimisation to the registration and login flows, and development of a method for user feedback and CSAT tracking.
Over the years, I’ve been involved with numerous campaign briefs, including annual projects with partner agencies to promote Game of Thrones being filmed in Northern Ireland; and several evolutions of the Ireland.com brand strategy.
More recently I lead the UX design of a new global website and Sitecore platform. This project started with a detailed research and discovery phase, leading into design studio concept sessions over several months, and resulted in a hyper-personalised experience vision. I presented this vision at Tourism Ireland’s annual ‘Digital days’ conference. This project is currently still in development.
Good stuff: During the early development of the new Ireland.com website, I was asked to present our concept and experience vision at the annual Digital Days conference. This brought together market teams from around the world and was the first business-wide presentation of the future of their digital platform.
Bringing Kando* to a global web platform
Sony Electronics have partnered with Hugo & Cat for many years to craft unique product story content for each new product launch. With this high level of trust, Hugo & Cat were asked to work on UX optimisation and new feature development for the Sony Global Web platform.
I lead a small team who worked directly with clients based in Japan and a large development team based in Istanbul. We were asked to uncover new insights about the customer experience, and to use this knowledge to create new features that would optimise the platforms performance.
*Kando is a Japanese principle meaning to ‘the simultaneous feelings of deep satisfaction and intense excitement that we experience when we encounter something of exceptional value’. Sony have adopted Kando as a core design principle - ‘move people emotionally’
Flying in the face of ordinary UX
By reinventing the meaning of quality air travel, Virgin Atlantic managed to capture the hearts and minds of many customers, whilst establishing an expectation of an invigorating customer experience.
The brand worked alongside DigitasLBi for several years, embedding experience principles at all levels of the business and establishing an award winning website that years later still upholds these high standards. However, in 2014 their app experience was lagging behind.
The agency team spotted an opportunity, to showcase how a new app could easily boost the Virgin Atlantic digital offering, but also epitomise the brand experience in a completely new way.
I was brought into a secret team of four, locked in a basement for 6 weeks and tasked to turn this opportunity into a ‘ready-to-release’ iOS and Android app that could be sold to the client.
App has since been redesigned.
New Pharma.
Grünenthal, a family owned pharmaceutical company knew it was time to reinvigorate their brand and digital presence. The aim was to…
“…deliver four to five new products to patients in diseases with high unmet medical need by 2022 and become a €2 billion company. “
Partner agency FutureBrand ran a rebrand project to be implemented across a series of new websites, including a corporate site and product information hub.
Hugo & Cat were tasked to concept, design and deliver a new corporate website. The delivery would consist of the front end HTML only, but setup and coaching support for in-house developers would also be provided as they would would complete the final build in Sitecore.
I led the UX design of this project, working with various parts of the business to understand specific needs, and was instrumental in creating one of Hugo & Cat’s first custom pattern libraries for this project.
New experiences for modern air
The world of low cost air travel is constantly innovating. Wizz Air have stayed up in the air by developing quickly since 2003, now connecting 150 destinations through lean and ultra efficient processed from their base in Budapest. The brand worked with Hugo & Cat sister agency, FutureBrand across many projects, and drafted me in to support with a concept and innovation brief for the future of air travel.
The brief was to ideate with a mixed team of Wizz Air stakeholders, including brand, marketing and digital leads, but also pilots and other crew members. Working with the FutureBrand team, we held a series of workshops to explore new target audiences, and ways in which to engage them. Ultimately forming a series of high level concepts.
I developed three concepts over several weeks, creating context scenarios for specific new persona and iteratively developing wireframes and visual designs to support the narrative. Three ideas were presented back to the Wizz Air team for operational validation and prioritisation.
Project not currently live
Retail store design. Different is Better.
Partnerships help us to explore different ideas and see design from a new angle. Hugo & Cat partnered with sister agencies FutureBrand and UXUS to create product brands, design retail spaces, and enhance the in-store experience with new digital offerings.
After a successful program of brand and visual identity redesign with FutureBrand, Lenovo engaged UXUS and Hugo & Cat to create a new design for their retail store environments, branching from tiny retail stalls measuring a few metres to flagship experience centres across the world.
I worked as the Lead Experience Designer, alongside teams from UXUS and H&C, to design a brand new in-store experience. The remit included the design of how customers would be attracted, move around, explore and engage with products, and to concept new ‘experience touchpoints’ to support the desired customer experience.
We conducted a large research and strategy phase, mapping out the desired journey across key unit sizes and developing themes by which to engage customers of various types. The concepting phase saw experts from across the team come together to ideate ways to use existing Lenovo technology in innovative ways to attract attention or engagement. Such as projectors built into the Moto phones used for and interactive projection mapping installation.
The project produced a playbook for Lenovo, outlining how and when to implement each feature and to build every table and shelf across any store size. Hugo & Cat also developed a digital interactive table, alongside numerous other touchpoints.
Retail space designs implemented around the world.
Digital transformation for the world’s best airline
Shortly after being named the words best airline 2014, Cathay Pacific sought a new digital partner to transform their customer offering, overall experience, and technical infrastructure.
This coincided with my start at DigitasLBi as a User Experience Architect. First day in the job I was dropped into a fast paced, six week prototype and validation project, designing and building a front end customer journey for a new responsive web experience. This was run in six week-long sprints, each focusing on a new customer and specific booking or planning journey.
The output experience was loved by the client team, and quickly led to a full program of work to create a new website and cross platform app. This is where the adventure really started as I was asked to undertake a secondment to Hong Kong to work within the clients offices on the new mobile app.
Working alongside a large client team located in Tung Chung, I collaborated closely with a UI designer to ideate, design, and prototype the first 2 releases of the Cathay Pacific mobile app. This was built on a new version of the Kony platform, enabling cross platform development from a single codebase.
Good stuff: Whilst working on the flight status feature, I saw an opportunity to drive real value for customers. Instead of presenting three simple status’ of ‘Departed’ ‘Not departed’ and ‘Arrived’ I worked with a BA and development team to enable meaningful messages to be presented, transforming ‘Departed’ into ‘Your flight departed 40 minutes late, but is due to arrive on time’.
Data liberation.
Cognite is a company full of smart cookies. Working with proprietary technology to command big data, they are on a mission to make better use of vast amount of information generated by various types of modern industries. The data middle men.
I worked on the design and build of Cognite’s website alongside fellow designers who focused on a full rebrand. The site was to be a way for the company to attract new business, but also to convey their ambitious mission statement and to attract other smart cookies to the company.
The work focused on the concept of bringing meaning to the incomprehensible, and we used this concept to guide the structure, content and visual design of every page.
The final product was successfully launched, and spurred additional growth within the business. Today the platform continues to be used to tell the Cognite brand story and showcase the latest innovations
Good stuff: ‘Bringing meaning to the incomprehensible’ was presented with the use a custom variable font, transforming parts of letters from unrecognisable geometric shapes to legible characters and revealing a sentence. I taught myself how to use font lab and created a unique typeface to achieve this effect.
Modernising British cultural heritage
The National Trust name is synonymous with stately homes and English gardens, but their remit extends much further and the organisation is charged with the preservation of numerous historic sites and natural environments around Great Britain.
As Senior Experience Architect, I worked within a large team of designers, UXers and developers to create a brand new web platform and cross-platform app for the National Trust. I focused on several key areas of the website, including the Search experience, Property Detail Pages, Events, and the Walking Trails experience.
Each section of the design was defined structurally via a template description diagram and workshopped with the client to establish a clear picture of business needs before user research and design began. The process ran in several 2 week sprints, divided by working sessions with the client in the National Trust head office.
The development of the new platform was completed in-house, and so close collaboration with the technical delivery team was a core part of the project. The design team sat within the daily scrum as the site was built, helping to refine and adjust specific user stories when required.
The final result was a leap forward for the National Trust, unifying data across many systems and creating a brand new and modern face to the brand.
Good stuff: Every part of the user experience is important and an opportunity to create a loveable moment. One fun part of the project saw the team create a series of 404 designs, of which just one made it to the live build.
Life insurance, that gives you life!
A new life insurance company, a brand still in development, and six weeks to design and launch a new marketing website and functional ‘get a quote’ experience.
Our client approached Hugo & Cat and FutureBrand to help them launch in a tight timeframe. A team from FutureBrand worked on the brand strategy and visual identity, whilst Hugo & Cat worked alongside a specialist development agency to design and build the website and quick quote journey. All parties came together during this time to define the company name ‘reviti’.
reviti’s mission is to provide life insurance for everyone, but also to provide the resources and support to help individuals improve their lifestyle, with the aim to reduce premiums over the course of their policy.
I worked on the marketing site and quote journey, mapping out the questions and logic required to fill out a form and validating the suggested implementation with the underwriters. One key aim was to simplify the journey, providing an indicative quote by answering a small set of questions, which required numerous iterations of the flow, legal signify, and ultimately additional backend logic to be created.
The design of the site was completed on time, with reviti working with Hugo & Cat for many years after initial launch to expand the site and company proposition.
Some parts of the site have since been updated
Guaranteed Tough
Dewalt is a strong brand. By creating reliable power tools for the worlds most demanding applications, they have established themselves as clear industry leaders in construction, heavy duty trade, and professional tools. Dewalt is part of the Stanley Black & Decker family, a company I’ve worked with for many years.
The journey with Dewalt started with the desire to reorientate their omnichannel marketing efforts to be more customer centric - putting a focus on learning more about users to understand where value can be added. I joined the project at the start, leading a hypothesis-driven customer journey mapping process based on existing segmentation profiles. This map was co-created with key stakeholders and iterated several times, taking into consideration all existing marketing efforts and identifying gaps in the experience.
This core journey was then used to direct additional projects, from standardising digital marketing approaches, and highlighting core needs from a new creative approach for social media. At the same time, Dewalt were looking to modernise their web presence, and opted to pause and replan the project with Hugo & Cat to use the customer centric thinking to rationalise key structural and creative decisions.
As the web project developed, I championed a modular, pattern library driven approach to the build, enabling local markets to tailor content per their specific marketing needs and available product catalogue. This approach was later presented to the global Stanley Black & Decker technology team, where it was deemed appropriate enough to use as a new global platform for all product brands. I worked with an internal team at Hugo & Cat on a white label build and the Dewalt brand, whilst supporting the global design team in the US to roll out new front end variations for the same functional component base. Development was shared between both H&C and global technology teams, producing a massive new Sitecore build, to support Stanley Black & Decker globally for years to come.
Only some market sites are currently rolled out.
Believe in better app design
Sky is the biggest name in TV across the UK, bringing the latest and best channels, shows, and movies to various devices. I joined the Product Design & Development team, a small team of UX and UI designers responsible for bringing some of the major Sky experiences to life across a range of devices, from websites to set-top box, native phone apps and game console experiences.
Over my time at Sky I worked on several different app iterations, creating screen designs, high fidelity prototypes for testing, and all required art working and content creation. In addition to these apps, I also worked on small projects for Sky News and within a crack team on concepting the future of the Sky platform - the output of which continued to drive feature development of the Sky+ platform for years to come.
Sky Go
I worked on Sky Go for over a year, developing ideas for two versions of the app and working alongside various development teams on the phone apps, website, and console versions. By the end of my time at Sky I was the sole designer across these platforms.
Sky Wifi
A relatively new product for Sky at the time, I worked on the UI of the second version of the app, taking the dated design into the newer Sky branding and creating all assets for the app.
Sky Plus
The Sky plus app was a complicated beast, I worked on implementing the innovation second-screen experience of Zeebox directly into the app, enabling community driven conversation alongside live broadcasts.
Projects have since been updated
Good stuff: As input controls on game consoles are limited, the first version of Sky Go for PS3 required some innovative thinking. I created a multilayered UI pattern that enabled easy access to numerous levels of catalogue navigation using only joystick movement. A keynote prototype was used to demonstrate animation patterns, and this UI is still present on Playstation and Xbox apps today - many years later.