About me

I am an award winning senior digital interaction consultant with longstanding international experience in designing convergent internet solutions.

I am a functional and conceptual creative that views technical constraints as potential for innovative solutions. My experience covers transactional software driven as well as large scale informational internet services, plus I have a keen interest in the mobile internet.

I follow a user centered design strategy. This means that not only do I make users needs central to my design activities, but I monitor changing user needs closely over time in terms of future trends and innovative services and products. I then tie this knowledge in with business needs and goals to produce innovative and future proof digital interactive solutions.

I am part of a new breed of academics that unites theoretical and empirical knowledge of HCI, technical and design philosophy with a commercially viable, pragmatic approach.

My Phd explored issues of cognitive and enactive perception; this knowledge is crucial for understanding how people take in information and, more importantly, how they want to take information in.  My academic work also helped me to vary and extend my research vocabulary with elements from social science, which supports user research in particular in terms of social media and the fast evolving techno- and youth cultures.

Computational Culture, a software studies' journal

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of interdisciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.

I enjoyed brushing up on my production skills in HTML / CSS and XML, while designing and producing this on-line journal in Wordpress. It is an exciting aspect of social media publishing platforms to open publication opportunities in more flexible, yet easy accessible and distributable ways then traditional media, while addressing institutional requirements for publication.

VW America - DCC (Dealer Communication Center)

VW DCC was an exciting opportunity to put highly intuitive inter-action principles such as fluidity and exploration into action. Users can find VW dealers via drag, zoom, and point and click on a Google map overlay. More traditional lexical navigation options, such as entering dealers' names or zip codes in a search box, and an alternative list view are also offered.

Besides dealing with the business requirements, functional interface and interaction design, I enjoyed acting as a link between strategy, statistics, usability testing and UX, while adding my qualitative research skills. For example I analysed a medium scale database of qualitative user feedback using NVivo, a qualitative research tool. This allowed me to process a large amount of material in just a couple of days. The resulting easy to grasp graphs were offset with quantitative data from analytics software – allowing the team to gain a very high degree of insight into user behaviour. The user centric processes and team efforts paid off, when the site was tested by an independent automotive body :

BERLIN/LONDON - On Tuesday 2 August JDPower released its latest Automotive website survey results. The site launched by AKQA in the US last year increased its overall score by 57 points, bringing the site to a #13 ranking. This is an improvement in ranking of 19 places from our previous JDPower study and set a 5 year record [for VW].

AKQA provided a fast paced and constructive environment (agile), so solutions could quickly be evaluated and optimised. Since this application lends itself perfectly to mobile use, we designed it so all crucial aspects of the navigation are kept in the 10" (iPad) screen area, while also working closely with the mobile team.

On a personal level I enjoyed being on a bi-lingual account, and having a German chat once in a while to brush up on the latest German net-jargon :)