Here is a collection of some of the projects, both personal and professional. Please enjoy.
Given my experience in design, product development and front end development, I am best placed in lead or product ownership roles.
I focus on measurable, tangible outcomes for business by developing processes that support the people and relationships that drive business value.
I have always seen my role as the person that brings a product vision to an IT project, similarly to the way an architect brings a vision to a construction project. I formalise the vision with super high fidelity prototypes - so high in fact, the devs don't need to code the UI if they don't want to. I refer to this as a 'Product First' approach or 'UI Architecture'.
By the early 2000s, it was clear to me that most IT projects lacked a vision of the final product, contributing to the metric of the day that '80% of all software projects failed'. Unlike any other product centric industry, IT lacked a design phase focused on product usability, instead relying on traditional engineering practices to deliver software.
Culturally, traditional IT has always been quietly skeptical of 'design' because it was seen as a superficial, non-essential part of the process, widely regarded as a luxury. There was no acknowledgement that if the product worked well and was easy use, it was a boost to business productivity and the bottom line.
I learned how to build software from an opposing perspective to traditional engineering, focusing first on the usability requirements pertaining to the needs of the users. Once I am provided a brief, I can envision the application with it's main areas of functionality, and screen by screen, I design and build the UI discussing requirements and fleshing out functionality with stakeholders as I go.
The process of developing the functional scope through the development of high fidelity UI prototypes is an effective way to:
This is all before a team of developers need to be engaged to build the application. When they are engaged they have a complete prototype on which to base their effort estimations, allowing for more accurate cost and time frame estimations for the completion of project milestones.
I can help you with the following:
Are you working on, or does your business use an app that you feel could be improved, but you're uncertain exactly how? I can evaluate the product and provide a report on how it could be improved in the areas of usability, accessibility, layout, precognitive strategy, cognitive functional arrangement, process efficiency, feature inclusion and style.
Do you have an idea for a product but you're not sure how to get it off the ground? I can help you develop the product from concept to prototype, including the development of a design system, a functional scope of work, a high fidelity prototype and a user testing strategy.
Do you have a product that needs a product owner? I can take on the role of product owner for your product, managing the development team, the product vision, the product roadmap, the product backlog and the product strategy.
Do you have a product that needs a design system? I can develop a design system for your product, including a style guide, a component library, a pattern library and a UI architecture.
Is your team having trouble delivering a bespoke, responsive, accessible, cross browser compatible UI? I can build and debug HTML layouts, helping your team deliver a UI that meets all of these requirements.
(Front of) Front end development, HTML, CSS/SCSS, Javascript, web animation, feature ideation and strategy, components and frameworks, accessibility, responsive layouts, cross browser compatibility, Agile, version control and various 'DevOps' apps including Jira and Gitlab.
UX Research, business analysis, UX Design, interaction design, information architecture, wire-framing, prototyping, user testing, usability testing, accessibility, design systems, design thinking, design sprints, design strategy, design leadership, design management and design systems.
Product development, 3D modelling, animation and printing. Graphic design, branding, logo design, icon design, illustration, and copy writing.
I was contracted to Hearing Australia to work as a Senior UX/UI consultant to design and build their web site, being a part of a greater project of a business wide digital transformation.
Starting in December 2021, I was seconded to Service Victoria to work as a Product Shaper for their digital service offerings. Predominantly working in the mobile space, my role was to design new features to be deployed for the Service Vic mobile app. I also worked in the web space on the Business Licensing initiative, a service that allows councils to transform their existing administration services to the digital space.
I was approached to take on the role for Senior UX Consultant for the Empired+Intergen Consulting Agency. My work there included designing UI for Power Apps for the Department of Education, the (multi-award winning) Super SA web site , Parliament of South Australia Members lounge kiosk, consulting on the UI of one of Empired's Sharepoint products and developing a Reporting Principles style guide for the Department of Education.
During my time at Services Australia I was lucky enough to be on a project team at the inception of an application and see it through to hand over. Employed as part of the Analysis Practice as a UX Designer, my role covered many areas including Graphic Design, Analysis, Accessibility Development, UI Design and Front End Development.
I worked in a SAFE Agile environment using Adobe CC, Jira, Gitlab, Git CI, Visual Studio, Angular, MS Office and for the first time ever, Windows, to engage with stakeholders and produce friendly analysis documents, graphics, icons, UI for my great dev team (DARC Web) and stakeholders.
I was brought aboard Optus to help with the adoption of a Salesforce based Social Platform called 'Chatter' that Optus Comms was using to deliver company wide communications. This was to be done by re-skinning it and plying it with an Optus branded, friendly UI. I was quickly adopted by the Salesforce team as the UX Designer, participating in over 20 projects ranging from developing logos and icons for Salesforce, to programming deeply detailed working prototypes of company facing software apps in the retail arm, Augmented Reality research and developing concepts for store interiors in 3D.
During my brief (yet intense) stint at Atomix, situated in North Adelaide, I worked on workspace.com.au and the zoossa.com.au multi-site that includes adelaidezooo.com.au and monartozoo.com.au. I also contributed as a writer for their procedures knowledge base.
Funny little patch of work where I obtained 6 clients all running for council elections in Adelaide, needing campaign collateral in the form of flyers, letters posters and web sites. I produced their collateral and wrote campaign letters, engaging in discussions concerning election strategies and so-forth. A very pleasant bunch of people to deal with. 3 of them got elected.
Produced another web site for James Knowler. A very simple website designed to show off his work and make it easy to navigate. Also simplified the backend processes for James making it simple for him to organise his images. The site is also completely responsive.
Pangolin Associates are commercialising the research they have done and are making an effort to become more marketable. They approached me for some design work resulting in logo development for two businesses, 'Energy Buster' and 'Sustainable Savings.'
Consulted on UX for Sustainability House's public facing software for calculating building energy efficiency. After an in-depth study of their app, I provided branding and a document with a strategy for improving their software.
Senior Developer, Full time contract working mainly on jayco.com.au but also other small jobs including a responsive landing page for Classic Timber Furniture.
Full time permanent position. Responsibilities included production management, project management/coordination, client management, IT Strategy Consulting, business analysis, tender/proposal writing, writing technical briefs, writing learning system modules and HTML/CSS/Javascript development, for clients including Mitsubishi Motors and BHP Billiton.
Jackson Care Technology employed me for a 3 month contract to design the UI for a browser application that managed the set up, configuration and notification system to be used in hospitals and aged care facilities.
Projects in this period included:
Carbon Planet was carbon management company that started out by retailing carbon credits. Carbon Planet originated and traded carbon credits and consulted on carbon credit project development. They provided 'carbon education' - an education pack for schools, built web based carbon management software, provided carbon and energy audits for business and retailed carbon credits through the web site. They were also enagaged in some carbon credit origination projects.
As the 'design manager', my job was to design and build the web site, the interface and branding for the carbon management software (G3MS), and all sales collateral published by Carbon Planet.
I also co-wrote 2 papers presented submitted to the Copenhagen climate summit.
I'll gloss over this part of my career as it was simply a time where I was working from home. I had many clients and my work was enjoyable. I did a lot more illustration, animation and arty kinds of things during this time. Most of my clients were small businesses with small budgets.
At Recall Design I worked with stakeholders to develop the scope and interface prototypes for enterprise web applications. Clients included MYOB, Citibank.
Spent a semester teaching art students how to make web sites.
Co-started a business in 1996 with Mark Ingman in computer graphics and design. The company soon morphed into a web development company and in 1997 won the Telstra web awards for 'Australia's Best Sporting web site' for the South Australian Cricket Association 'RedBacks' web site. Clients included Victoria Parks, PIRSA, State Theatre, Animal Welfare League and the University of South Australia.
Matt Wicks
SSW, Solution Architect
Kiriana Meha-Bettison
Project Manager, Hearing Australia
Stephen Molloy
Senior Product Designer, Service Victoria
Darren Whitelaw
Chief Customer Officer, Service Victoria
Mathew Pigram
Full Stack Developer, Team Lead, Services Australia
Faiyaz Khan
Full Stack Developer, Team Lead, Services Australia
Tony Yuen
Project Manager, Optus
Mark Ingman
Full Stack Developer
Alex Blood
Senior Executive / Transformational Leader / Board member / Innovator / Social and Enviro Sustainability
Vivienne Holloway
Strategic Projects Consultant
Hearing Australia is a great company filled with wonderful, hard working people. They are the largest provider of government funded hearing services in Australia and have been around for over 75 years.
Hearing Australia employed me for a 6 month contract to help them redesign their web site as part of a larger company wide transformation. My role was to lead the UX design and research for the project, working with the product owner, Kelly, and a team of 3 developers from SSW to rebuild their web site with Kentico CMS.
Early on, it was impressed upon me that Hearing Australia's competition in the Hearing Health industry had more than tripled the marketing spend over the previous 4 years. Hearing Australia had to become a competitive entity within the industry and therefore the UX needed to be industry leading.
I approached the task as I usually do, producing a documented analysis of the existing digital assets and user behaviour thereof, shaping the strategy for the transition.
I defined the user journeys of people from different demographics and completed a layout of the landing page, all within the first two weeks, which was received well.
The booking process was a key user experience. I interviewed several people about the processes and information required in order for the system to be able to accurately "triage" the needs of the user. It wasn't triaging so much as determining the length of the appointment based on the users' needs. I made sure the web site UI to made the booking process a visually persistent feature of the site.
I designed the site to make the Hearing Australia brand more of a lifestyle brand, to advocate for those with reduced hearing health by presenting the idea that hearing health issues are common and don't have to negatively impact lifestyle.
I also tried to impress that hearing health is a familial issue with which the user is able to assist, and that Hearing Australia is the best place to go for hearing health and care. These narratives were actually cobbled together from the previous web site but you had to dig for them. I put them on the home page where they would be of the greatest value.
This approach was met with a fantastically positive response from the Customer Experience Director. I got rounds of applause and gasps of wonder and the Marketing Head, Bernadette, offered me a permanent role once my contract was up.
In 2021/22, I was employed by Service Victoria to be a 'product shaper' for the Service Victoria app. We were in peak COVID at the time, and my role was to map out the processes for features to be added to the app, such as a feature for recording, reporting and displaying Rapid Antigen Testing results.
The job, basically, was being asked, 'How would we...?' and 'What would it look like if...?' and I would map the processes and the UI required to do it and send back nice, aesthetically pleasing documents that were the blue prints for how it could be done.
Thanks mostly to the pandemic, the Service Victoria app picked up the award for 'Most Downloaded App on The App Store'. This accolade was leveraged to exponentially boost the budget and thus the project was awash with cash and possibly also drunk on power.
During the my time at Service Victoria, I completed a variety of work including:
I had never worked in such a large team. Every feature was ensconced in executives, product shapers, product directors, product leads, user researchers and UI elaborators. There was also outsourced usability testing and user acceptance testing facilities and a couple of teams of developers. So hardly anything got done.
Super SA is the superannuation fund for the South Australian public sector. They have over 300,000 members and $30 billion in funds under management. New legislation had been passed to allow South Australian public servants to use any superannuation fund as opposed to the traditionally mandated, Super SA.
Super SA now needed to compete in the financial markets, invoking a knee jerk reaction from the board. Until this point they had never really needed to compete and their web site indeed was indicative of this, promoting the organisation and not the products.
I came to this project late, taking over the role of Senior UX consultant during the wire-framing phase, seeing out the completion of the wire-frames, layouts, style and navigation. I also worked on the front end development of the project with the development team. The site built using Optimisely and Tailwind CSS.
The talented team that worked on this project did months of long hours to get it done in the very short time frame for a site of this complexity, generously subsiding the cost of the project for Empired and SuperSA to bring it in on time and on budget.
The project was a success and the new site was launched in June 2021, winning 3 awards, including:
Starting in 2017, I worked on a few different projects at Services Australia, starting with 'Veteran Centric Reform' a very large and politically charged project to reform the back office software for the Veteran's Services. I then worked on some 'Compliance' software for collecting financial data and finally moved to the Data Analytics and Research Centre (DARC).
It became clear that 'UX' was not well understood by Services Australia.
IT at Services Australia relegated the role of UX to a 'compliance' role. The UXers responsibility
was to review the software that had been completed and ensure that:
Things like suggesting clearer layouts, better navigation, more intuitive interactions, were not part of the UX role at Services Australia.
After 9 months I was sent to the Data Analytics and Research Centre (DARC). Research was being conducted in the areas of AI and data science and they used AGILE, which was pretty new for the Services Australia at the time.
This was all part of a vision to create a Services Australia 'Data Lake' - a place where all of Services Australia's data, which is mostly sensitive, personal data, is securely collected, stored and processed. This would allow for a huge gain in organisational efficiencies, providing line-of-site to data metrics, origination and quality.
Services Australia already had a lot of data and data sources that, for the purposes of transparency and accountability, needed to be clearly tracked within a register. If a minister was asked about the nature of the data Services Australia collects about the Australian people, the the Minister should be able to answer that question.
The Chief Data Officer (CDO) was tasked with creating a register of all the data sources and data sets that Services Australia had. To do this they decided that a table in SharePoint was the best approach. It was audited and the report showed that the Sharepoint table failed to provide the level of transparency, detail and accuracy required.
I was asked to design an app that would support the process of registering and managing data exchanges and data sets. The app was given the name, CITADEL which was an acronym for 'Customer Information Through a Data Exchange Library' (not my idea) and would become a front-end for the Data Lake project.
I carried out the discovery and design for the app. Interviewing people that already manage exchanges and creating process flows and wireframes. I then created a design system and prototyped all of the views that were then implemented with Angular and carried out with AGILE.
Half way through the project, Services Australia mandated the use of the official design system that had just been released. So we pivoted quickly to adopt the new design system. I assembled all of the views in Angular, with the team implementing them in a single sprint.
There are a few headwinds that come with working for the Australian Government. Too many meetings and project direction can be easily swayed by political whims. Despite all that, my team known as 'Darc Web' (who I loved) delivered. CITADEL was universally regarded as 'better than the Sharepoint table' and so was considered a great a success.
My experience working for Services Australia at DARC was very good. I had many very talented colleagues, and many insightful conversations, giving me a deep insight into the workings of the Australian Government and the challenges it faces. IT probably being the primary challenge. Haha.
* I remember a casual lunch conversation with a front-liner (a person that deals directly with customers) who rolled her eyes and shook her head when I mentioned I was working on improving the compliance software for collecting financial data. The last time they upgraded the software that she used, it was a disaster for their department. Apparently this was a common occurrence at Services Australia.
Optus were investing heavily in IT in 2015. They had reached a point where the patchwork set of 24 apps used for managing customers had been deemed a competitive liability and they were looking to replace them with a unified system that by the time I was employed there, it was years late and $150M over budget.
I was employed to join a small, yet talented R&D team as a designer to assist with designing/presenting/building new ideas and strategies.
Over the next couple of years I worked on about 24 separate projects, some requiring conceptual and exploratory work, others being fun graphics work and others being full blown front end development. Like most large organisations, when you earn a reputation for design and graphics, you get asked to do a lot of bits and pieces for lots of different jobs.
Optus turned out to be a great place to work. The people on my team were talented and supportive. The projects were engaging and challenging and the culture was fun and relaxed.
There was a time, well within living memory, when Australia was on the cutting edge of climate change action. Our government, at the time, had not only embraced the climate science but had implemented a carbon pollution reduction scheme, that was literally called the 'Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme' (CPRS).
Carbon Planet was originally a start-up, 'carbon credit retail business' started by Dave Sag and Ross Williams. I was brought on board to help them with their web site and business collateral. I had history with both Dave and Ross, having a neighbouring office with Dave Sag and having worked with Ross Williams quite a bit in the past.
Soon Carbon Planet found another large investor (and friend and previous business colleague of Ross Williams), Jim Johnson, that was so enamoured by the concept he came aboard as Managing Director, raising a lot more investment capital and taking the company in a new, global direction, going from a simple retail business to a global carbon credit origination and trading company.
Due to the heat in the market and the new regulatory landscape, there was a lot of green investment money
floating around and Carbon Planet started developing a software platform to help business to 'Measure,
Manage and Minimise' their energy and carbon (equivalent) emissions. They called it 'G3MS'.
When it started, it wasn't really a political thing. It was just a nice business idea. Ross Williams had constructed a small business that was basically saying, 'Hey, if you want to offset your carbon emissions, carbon credits are a simple, reliable and cost effective way to do that. Him and Dave Sag were of the first to offer that as a service.
Back then, if it weren't for the legislation, the carbon industry would have been non-existant. So you can imagine my surprise when the following government, led by Tony Abbot, framed the whole thing as a 'tax grab' and pledged to get rid of it.
My role in all of this was to design and create all of company collateral, which included their online retail store, web sites, corporate and sales collateral, educational, community outreach material. I even wrote a script for a comic book and submitted 2 papers to the COP15 Climate Change Conference about the best places to originate Carbon Credits.
Carbon Planet was truly a wonderful place to work. There were several Climate Science PHDs, a lovely team of software developers, an amazing marketing and community outreach team, a great team of sales people and an overall, company-wide desire to do good.
Part of the community outreach strategy was to create a comic book that would help explain the science of climate change to kids.
At first the task was left to me. I wrote a script and started to illustrate the comic. However, I soon realised I was in over my head so I approached a professional comic book artist, the venerable Nahum Ziersch to illustrate the comic for us.
Nahum was fantastic to work with. He was very open to my ideas, got the work done quickly and was really cool with feedback.
I started in web development in 1996 and over the years have designed, developed and deployed a large number of web sites, apps and dashboards for various clients, small and large.
In the early days there weren't any set ways to approach a project and we made it all up as we went along, running into all of the complex problems that come with software development and figuring out how to solve them ourselves.
I adopted the belief that the UI completely covers the functional scope of a human centric software application. If you prototype the UI first, the devs and stakeholders won't struggle to understand what is to be built and the project will run smoothly and be delivered on time. This approach works well and it's how I work to this day. It's called, 'Software UI Architecture'.
So my old dog, Penny, had become sad about the state of her back. She had developed spondylosis and her back legs weren't working properly. She was having trouble getting up and down, was in a lot of pain and I wanted to get her a more comfortable bed.
Of course a Google search for a decent looking dog bed came up bupkis, as it does these days, only showing ugly, cheap, impractical beds from their advertisers. So I decided to design and make her one. I wanted it to look like a piece of furniture that matched the decore of the house.
I wanted it to be warm in winter, cool in summer and slightly raised off the ground because she seemed to like being up on the couch. I also wanted to be able to remove the cushion covers so they were easily washable.
I used a combination of 3D modelling and 2D drafting to design the bed. I used Blender 3D to model the bed and then printed the design to test it.
I thought it would be a fairly simple process of designing the bed and then getting it cut out on a CNC machine, but I was unable to find anyone in Adelaide willing to cut it out for me, demonstrating Adelaide's lack of skill in this area. One firm told me it would cost $2000 just to set it up. Given that it takes about 20 minutes to set up the gcode in Fusion 360, I thought that was a bit steep.
In the end a friend of mine that runs a fabrication workshop in the US, that had been fabulously supportive throughout the entire process cut it out for me. It came together well for a prototype. Everything fit together nicely and it was very sturdy. I was very happy with the result - except that Penny didn't like it. She didn't like the height of it and she didn't like the cushion. I had to make her get on it for the photos.
If I was to design it again, I would make it a little wider and a little lower and simplify the shapes to be more efficient with the wood.
I needed an island desk that was able to adequately manage all of the cables that my home computer set up had. This included power and data cables for the computer, display, printer, scanner, tablet and chargers etc. Without cable management the all of the cables were exposed and it was a mess.
Back in 2012, a deep online search looking for island desks with cable management came up with nothing. This annoyed me because The IT revolution had happened already and there was no office furniture vendors out there with a built in solution for managing several powered devices on a desk, beyond a hole in the desk for the cables to fall through.
I got my tape measure and started measuring up the space I had to work with and went about modelling the desk in Blender 3D. I measured all of my devices as well as obtaining the dimensions of the largest computer tower cases on the market at the time, coming up with a design that was able to house all of my devices, fit two large computer tower cases behind the drawers, provide adequate ventilation for them, manage all of the cables connecting and powering them and fit through the door.
I commissioned Jason Wiseman to build it. He was a good fit for this project because he had designed a built a lot of specialised AV furniture and understood where I was coming from, borrowing the cable management technique for some of his subsequent designs.
I have had it for about 12 years now and it is still great to use.
There are times when you know exactly what you need for your house. We had been using the housing for a sub-woofer that came with the AV unit for the TV as the side table between two arm chairs in the living room, but I couldn't store anything with it.
As with everything I design for the house, it started with a disappointing Google search for a side table that suited our needs. Typically Google only showed the wares of it's largest advertisers, who due to their lack of taste, quality and innovative ideas, need to spend a lot on advertising so they don't go broke. Google favours it's advertisers in search results so it's difficult to find anything nice and I was forced to design my own.
As far as side tables go, this is not typical. It has two fronts because it doesn't go up against a wall, instead being situated between two arm chairs. The drawers keep things like glasses, remotes and game controllers handy. The design resembles a happy anime face because I love a bit of whimsy, and to match the style of another piece of Jason's furniture that we have.
Once again I turned to Jason Wiseman to build it.
This series of images were created in the early 2000s. I was pretty much exclusively using computers to create art back then bar a simple thumbnail sketch to remind me of the idea. Once I started to create the images, they had a tendency flesh themselves out.
Most of these images were created using 'Freehand' by Macromedia, which was a vector based drawing program. When the image lines were complete I would move the image into Photoshop to add more shading and highlights using a tablet to sketch in the details.
So I was doodling one day and I scrawled a little character that I called camel, the orange character. I modelled that in 3D because it was so easy and started to experiment with lighting and textures to get a nice subtle gradients on the surfaces. Soon the small red character, Ducky, was born, followed by the big, light blue character, Bear.
I expanded the character set out to 9 characters and set about developing dozens of compositions with them. I had an exhibition with about 40 pieces in it and sold all the small ones. I printed out 6 really big ones but only sold one, which in hindsight was a pretty obvious outcome.
I wanted people to put themselves into the compositions. I wanted them to see themselves in the characters and the situations. The characters ended up taking on their own personas and I was commissioned to design a pink character (Pinky), for a woman's niece.
I think if you have a background in Graphics and you're good with computers, you will have been asked to come up with a logo at some point. Pretty much all of these were professional requests from friends. It can be handy having a cheap source of graphical development in your network.
Way back when the internet was still running on 56kbps modems, I was lucky enough to undertake some projects that were ahead of their time. Food Drop was one of those projects.
By 1999 there had been some very large investments in the US to get people to order their groceries online that had failed catastrophically. Maintaining the enormous stock database with all the suppliers in those days was a big ask requiring a huge investment, not just in the software and infrastructure, but also the marketing to get people to use the service.
Food distribution is an ancient business that had been commandeered by the supermarkets. While initially it promised fresher food and better prices, the supermarkets had become the gatekeepers of food distribution and were using their power to gouge both food producers and customers for more profit.
Warren Cosgrove, a down to earth bloke with a strong entrepreneurial streak, came into Recall Design with an amazing plan. He was a food producer himself, processing chicken for Steggles, and was frustrated by the heavy handed control the supermarkets imposed on food producers. He had many friends in the industry all of which were suffering enormous pressure from the supermarkets.
Warren's nephew worked for Sun Microsystems at the time and was able to give Warren advice about the technology that was available and how it could be used to create a food distribution system that could bypass the supermarkets and put food distribution into the hands of the food producers, creating a fairer, more sustainable food distribution system.
Interviews and meetings with food producers had to happen in secret. If the supermarkets knew these meetings were taking place the food producers would be punished by the supermarkets who would not tolerate a food producer attempting to end their reliance on supermarkets, let alone infringe on their market share. The supermarkets would either cease to stock their products or change the shelving arrangements to make their products less visible to customers which could easily put an end to their livelihood.
The business case for Fooddrop was fairly simple. Food Producers were provided with tools for placing and managing their own inventories online, providing nutritional information, product shots and pricing. A public web site presented all of the food producers inventories in a single web site, resembling a large grocery store, but also allowed customers to visit the individual food producers pages.
When customers placed their orders, the food producers were notified of the orders and delivered to a refrigerated warehouse. The food was then packed into containers and delivered via a refrigerated delivery van to the customer within 36 hours of them placing the order.
Without supermarkets taking a huge margin, the food producers were able to sell their food at a competitive price while still earning more than what they could through the supermarkets. Food producers were able to sell their entire inventory through the web site, allowing more specialty foods to be available for the customer.
The customer benefits were also significant. Apart from the convenience of having food delivered to their door, the food was fresher and cheaper than what was available at the supermarkets. The customer was also able to purchase food that was not available at the supermarkets as well as form relationships directly with with food producers, as was the case with me. All food was sourced within 200kms of the Adelaide CBD and was naturally seasonal.
The delivery system was franchised. The franchisee was responsible for delivering the food to the customer in reusable, styrofoam containers. The customer would then return the containers to the franchisee when the next delivery was made. The franchisee would then return the containers to the Food Drop warehouse where they would be cleaned and reused.
Working on the requirements for this project was one of the best professional experiences I have ever had. The ideas for customer conveniences were endless and every meeting was great fun. Food producers that were involved in the project regularly delivered delicious food to the office.
At the end of this process, the business consisted of 4 web sites:
Customer web site features included:
Food producer portal features included:
The Business Administration portal features included:
Franchisee portal features included:
It took me 3 months to perform the functional analysis and design the branding and the UI for the web sites, all happening concurrently. At the time, this was considered to be slow by the lead developer, Mike Jenkins, as once the designs were signed off by Warren, Mike Jenkins peer programmed with Andre Biganovski and had the first iteration of all sites complete within 11 days by building his own framework to speed up the development process. Can you even imagine? The sites were then tested and refined over the next 3 months.
From wo-to-go, the project took around 6 months to become an operational business. In it's first 6 months of operation the business gained over 3000 customers, around 40 food producers and had over 2000 items in the inventory. I was one of the customers and I loved the experience. I was on first name basis with the delivery guy, and regularly communicated with food producers. I gained an appreciation for the people that actually make the food I ate and the effort they put into it, that you simply don't when you are a customer of the supermarket. Also the 2 shopping lists were genius - organising a delivery would take me 2 minutes.
The business was making money and there were plans to add a 'meal manager' and a recipe database so that customers could plan out a weeks worth of meals and have the store automatically place the ingredients for those meals in the cart. I was so extremely proud of this project and was so excited to see where it was going.
But all was not well. Warren was under the impression that the site would cost around $50K to build. The site ended up costing closer $250K and Warren had not budgeted for this. Recall were fairly litigious and took him to court when he was unable to pay. Warren lost and was placed on a payment plan.
Warren ran Food Drop on a shoestring budget, stretching all the credit he could muster from the bank and the food producers. He ended up missing three payments to Recall and they took the site down. I was mortified. I asked the managing director of Recall Design if he would consider becoming a partner in Food Drop. He said the board, which was mainly MYOB execs, said they weren't in the business of running food distribution.
I have tried most farmer-centric food distribution services but they all fell short in one way or another:
All of the code base for Food Drop still exists and the system could be started up again over night, although, I think the UI would definitely need bit of a spruce given that it was initially designed for a 800px by 600px displays, before the concept of web accessibility had pervaded the industry.
I would like to see a group of food producers get together and start this up again, owning and managing the service themselves, with a goal to spread the business model to other cities, bringing a fairer, more sustainable food distribution service to the rest of Australia, as opposed to the foreign-owned, price gouging cartel we are forced to endure today.
It's not lost on me that a 'miscellaneous' section is not ideal information architecture, but there are a few bits and pieces that I thought would be nice to show that don't neatly fit into any of the other categories.
