T-Mobile

• Art direction and
• XHTML/CSS

T-Mobile is one of the largest mobile operators in the world and has acquired 17 million customers in the UK alone. The telecommunications industry is also one of the most cut throat in the world and T-Mobile looks to the web to deliver sizable revenue through its eCommerce platform.

I first came into T-Mobile as a senior designer employed to build clean, accessible code upon a new eCommerce platform using web standards. It was a project that saw us realign the underlying architecture from XMLC to Struts and Tiles. It also gave me an opportunity to champion the importance of semantic markup, accessibility, usability and incorporate new technologies such as sIFR and JavaScript libraries. Not long after the site's launch T-Mobile won the award for Online Retailer of the Year in the Mobile Choice Awards 2007.

I was then promoted and put in charge of directing the UI design team in both the UK and St Petersburg - the offshore resource pool that T-Mobile utilises on a project to project basis. This required me to shape a whole different skill set including: managing resource, budgets, performance management, remote teams as well as UI design direction and governance.

During my time at T-Mobile I vehemently championed the importance of the end user experience to the business. I recommended to the management the implementation of effective working practices, such as adopting design description documents; use casing each piece of interaction; writing personas; running though scenarios; running usability sessions etc. Essentially employing all the tools to safeguard the end user experience.

As is the case in many large organisations 'change' has taken a long time to be fully realised, but the recommendations I have made are now slowly being adopted within T-Mobile UK and has been the catalyst for an internal online experience team to be created! I'm pretty proud of that.