Portfolio

This is a mobile/handset interface design concept I created for Tourism Australia. The brief was to reach potential tourists, mainly in the UK, and lead them on a three-step journey: inspiration, exploration, then conviction to book a holiday… all through the vehicle of shared photos. The concept trades off the power of shared experiences, and the more luscious the photos — and the more they’re shared — the better.

Single photo, with links for photo information, and forward/next icons	The same single photo, but ‘turned around’ to display details, and calls to action	A location screen, with links relating the location to planning a visit

(Click the images above for larger versions)

Photos can be uploaded, downloaded, tagged, and shared. Each photo, as well having social tagging, is tagged with one or more evocative ‘experience’ categories, such as plunge, savour, indulge, and so on. The interface design rationalises away many of the elements that can occupy the space in a regular browser window, yet retains all the elements needed for people to save photos, destinations and itineraries online, moving them towards the point of booking a holiday.

I also packaged these designs into a presentation board, with a storyboard-style sketch to show context, and the progression from a typical rainy London working day to what a sun-soaked holiday in Australia could be like (click for larger version):

Nuix is an enterprise search software product geared to domains that have to deal with incredible amounts of data, such as legal firms, government and regulatory organisations. I worked with several consultants at PTG Global to reorganise and redesign the user interface of the product, as well as creating the visual design.

The ground-up redesign included a user requirements phase of workshops to flesh out Nuix’s own customer research. It also traded off the sort of interface patterns that user demographics were known to be familiar with, to ensure that the new design was as intuitive as possible. The new visual design integrated Nuix’s brand with the various interface elements, along with some customised icons and use of colour to ambiently indicate different status types of information.

As a recent review article said, the re-design gives “customers a new series of user interfaces which make it more intuitive, efficient and simple to use.” (Nuix3 Sets New Benchmark in User Interface Design for eDiscovery Software, Business Wire).

The product is unavailable for public view, but can be viewed by contacting Nuix.

TAFE Northern Sydney Institute website

The brief to redesign the website for TAFE Northern Sydney Institute was essentially to connect students with the right courses at the right campuses, and to promote the business services that TAFE NSI has to offer. Results of requirements workshops clearly indicated the search and browse paths that people preferred, as well as the various scenarios that are in place when they are looking for courses and campuses.

These lessons helped me and others at PTG Global to redesign the search and browse workflows and all page wireframes, so that they would display the right information on the right pages, to make course information as clear as possible to find, read and respond to.

There were several challenges in the interaction design. The main one was trying to unite all the different ways that people searched for course information in a clear, consistent pattern. This was overcome by organising an ‘advanced search’ (at the time titled more options) as a dynamically overlaid panel with options separated as course details, location details, and course delivery. Having in-page tabs for several column panels allowed us to stick to client’s requirements of including access to a lot of information in a relatively small space. Including a ’super footer’ in the design was also a good opportunity to re-cut the content and functionality available on the website in ways not otherwise available through the navigation.

The information architecture schema, screenflows, wireframes and technical specification were then handed over for another company to create the visual design.

Go to: nsi.tafensw.edu.au

Create Conference 2009 website

This is the new design I created for the createconference.org.au website for 2009, updating the design that I did last year. The brand had to still clearly focus on the airship, but FEVA was very keen to have a new look and feel, to emphasise the strong drive of creativity.

Last year’s vintage neo-Victorian ‘look’ was a big success, so this year I pursued the theme by exposing more of the pop-art illustrations, and less of the grungy weathered feel. I also wanted to use more white and blue to be more vibrant and to complement the deep red in the palette, moving away from the ‘tea-soaked’ age of the previous look.

The result was a lighter, airier feel, giving more space to the sky around the airship and dirigible. The 2009 topical ‘theme’ for the Create Conference was also ‘collaboration’, so I demonstrated this in the design by focusing on the ‘team at work’ inside the dirigible. Who knows what they’re really doing in there… the point is, there’s many complementary tasks going on to keep the airship going.

My illustrations went to Andrew Nobbs over at Barton Design, who put together an amazing brochure for the event. His exploration of sky and clouds and bold typography was then included in the website design.

LivingGreener.gov.au home page

LivingGreener.gov.au centralises a lot of knowledge available on living more sustainably, especially government information about rebates, grants and loans available. Although there are many websites out there that tackle various aspects of sustainability and what we can do about it, this website’s unique strategic goal is to centralise lots of disparate informatio, encourage further activity, and increase the community’s awareness and uptake of rebates and grants available from the government.

I and other consultants were involved at PTG Global with the user experience design for LivingGreener, including:

• Personas and want maps design based on user research, website traffic analysis and statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics
• Information architecture, including an overall conceptual model based on leading people at whatever point they were at, on a journey towards being more active to live more sustainably
• User interface design, with wireframes and prototypes and working with content writers to structure content to integrate action points throughout the website

Go to: livinggreener.gov.au

Government 2.0 Taskforce logo

I recently entered a logo design competition for the Government 2.0 Taskforce and they picked the entry you see above.

The Taskforce is made up of policy and technical experts and entrepreneurs. Its aims are to promote openness, transparency and innovation in government to make public sector information more widely available, and to encourage online engagement to draw information, knowledge, perspectives, resources and even - where possible - the active collaboration of anyone wishing to contribute to public life.

That’s a pretty big brief for a Taskforce, and it formed the brief for the actual logo. I entered two versions, including the one above in two variations. The idea behind the circles is about conversations and interactions popping up around the country, with the ‘water pools’ evoking ‘ripple effect’, harmonising with each other and rippling through each other.  The colours imply variety, optimism and vitality.

Lesley Ades website

Lesley Ades is a talented artist and doctor who has an intriguing and emotive style of artwork. She received a website that reflects her character and showcases her paintings and achievements.

Go to: lesleyades.com.au

Screenshot of the Create Conference home page

Create Conference is a day-long ideas fest run by FEVA for churches and other ministries to tackle communication issues, covering everything from improving death-by-PowerPoint sermon presentations, to promoting church in particular, and Jesus and Christianity in general, to the world around us.

This website was a huge departure from the usual corporate flavour I’m used to designing for, and I went at the brief with a vengeance. Once I had soaked in the existing brand and vision of FEVA and the conference, I brought two themes — an airship and a clockwork-slightly-steampunky feel — together to evoke an image of broadcasting in a playful, graceful way to the world around us.

The pressure was also on, not only with a very tight deadline, but also to produce a website that would demonstrate all the best-practice things that they were going to be talking about at the conference, about what a website should be and do.

I did some concept sketches that the client liked so much, they ended up running with the ’sketch’ theme in the downloadable conference information brochure (done by Andrew Nobbs at Barton Design). These were then transormed into what you see online.

Go to: createconference.org.au

Screenshot of the Workforce Guardian home page

Workforce Guardian is an online application to help businesses hire, manage and exit employees. The production of this website was by-the-book in terms of audience analysis (carried out by PTG Global), stakeholder consultation, rigorous information architecture, website optimisation and content strategy. The visual design and W3C standards-compliant XHTML was outsourced to Reactive, who really knew what they were doing. The website has also been tuned for best search engine tastiness by another external partner, who also perform ongoing search optimisation.

Update: after the website was first launched, I re-did the Products/product options index page with an accordion-style product comparison feature, which opened up the details of the features much more efficiently for people to view and decide which edition was best for them.

Another note: the website - especially the home page - has changed quite a lot since it was first launched.

Go to: workforceguardian.com.au

The Workforce Guardian identity

The Workforce Guardian logo features a double-shield design in blue-and-green freshness with a contemporary approachable typeface.

Workforce Guardian is an online application to help businesses hire, manage and exit employees. It’s geared towards small businesses who usually don’t have the time or the legal expertise to confidently produce legally bullet-proof employment contracts and to deal with many HR-related issues that larger companies with an HR department can deal with.

The design of this logo involved distilling a brand exploration exercise with the key business stakeholders and a marketing consultant into a pure statement of Workforce Guardian’s brand: employment relations expertise when you need it. Since the Workforce Guardian product is an online application, it was tempting to follow the path of many Web 2.0-ish design trends, but the company character and its target audiences were very different from, say, YouTube and Facebook.

The double-shield represents Workforce Guardian working with their customers, protecting the rights of both employer and employee. The green colour moves the tone away from being too conservative and - with employment relations legislation being a hot topic in the news at the time - too political.