I worked at East London advertising start-up Unruly. Known as the creators of The Viral Video Chart we formed methodology around why things are shared and helped brands ‘go viral’. I was employee #4 right out of university and worked there for 4 years, holding many roles from campaign management, team management, product, events, design and finally creative client solutions.
We decided to create an in-house “laboratory” where clients could come to learn about making shareable content. To showcase our data I project managed and creatively directed the custom build of 9 interactive touch screens.
Each of the 9 screens showed a different part of Unruly’s business. I decided to split them into 3 sets of 3 - Business, Current Data, Future Predictions. In the Business section, each screen included a video from each of the company’s founders you could tap to play, along with interactive data. The first screen was a history of our top campaigns with our COO, the second our technical capabilities of the product with animated tentacles coming from each element as told by our CTO, and the third animated through awards, employee growth and geographic growth as you scrub through a timeline voice by our CEO.
Other screens included the most shared videos by year, by brand vertical and by platform - all with the ability to watch each video and interact with the data. We also produced a pre-testing model for predicting virality using facial mapping software, which was previewed on other screens. The lab was widely successful and replicated in all of Unruly’s major offices globally.
Vyclone was a video app that synced video taken on your phone with footage taken by others filming the same thing. Within moments, Vyclone created one seamless video with everyone’s content intuitively edited together. It also had all the social features of a social app - follow, like, comment, share.
We were a short lived start-up with killer tech that ultimately didn’t achieve the social app dreams we set out to, although often raved about in press and consistently in the top 10 video apps in the App Store.
I worked there from 2012-13 leading product, doing investment pitches and speaking events, and supporting marketing.
The app and videos are no longer available but an example of Vyclone working is our partnership with Ed Sheeran to promote the song Give Me Love. Fans downloaded Vyclone and filmed themselves singing the song and Vyclone automatically edited a video together. Whenever a new video was added by a fan, the master video was instantly re-cut to feature clips of their video. This is the result.
We found that our app had some usability issues including speed to open the camera, getting lost in navigation and the multiple places you could receive notifications. I redesigned the app, alongside our in-house front end developers and design agency to have side bar navigation, single location for all notifications and camera open on side swipe.
We took investment money from Microsoft in order to build a Windows Phone and Windows 8 app. I project managed, designed the UX and creatively directed the build alongside app build agency Plain Concepts and an in-house team of back-end developers.
We adopted a Windows Phone style to the app, and replicated all functionality in the iOS and Android app, and added in new features.
I managed the product, UX and creative direction of the browser based video editor, again in partnership with Microsoft. We wanted something playful, fun and intuitive, and that worked with a touch screen in order to show off the W3C standardised pointer events in IE10. For example, the timeline you could side swipe to skip along it, pinch to zoom and double tap to remove cut points. To make a cut point you just tap or click on one of the synced videos on the right.
Our runway ended in 2013 and the company closed down the year after. TikTok is now succeeding in a way that we always hoped Vyclone would.
This was a fun personal project from 2013, I came up with the idea, designed the UI and worked with my parter to build an android app that helped you make meme panels.
Yarrly built on the fun of making meme panels but encouraged you to do this with your own photos. It was two panelled to focus creativity, android because this was an interesting dev challenge for us, anonymous to mimic the likes of Reddit, remixable so you could edit anyone’s content, and pirate themed just because.
The name Yarrly came from a popular meme at the name - ORLY / YAR RLY - which was a two panelled comic showing action and reaction. When said out loud it sounded piratey, so we themed it piratey.
Yarrly was an exercise in design and build for the two of us. He got to build his first android app and I got to flex my pirate design muscles, using this theme to influence everything from the app icons to our own hand designed font.
Skeuomorph was totally cool back in 2013, so I used elements from the pirating world as app icons. The spyglass took you to see other people’s content, the treasure chest was your own private collection, cross bones were delete, message in a bottle was share, and the steering wheel was the navigator and defacto “go” button.
The wheel had subtle changes to it depending on what you were doing in the app, more as background denotation than actual communication. It spun around when things were happening, and when you navigate left or right on the menus it spun in that direction. I know interfaces are meant to get out of your way, but I liked this animation more than the app idea itself, and we did make the app for our own personal fun.
Even the loading wheel was custom designed to look like shark fins swimming round.
In the background before you make your meme panel we wanted to have subtle suggestions for what you might do in an image / reaction way. I decided to take some reaction meme faces and turn them piratey, ending up with a suite of characters.
