How I work: 
Client spotlight - Ooyala

The problem: An inconsistent and undesirable experience

Ooyala had a suite of products used by Fox Sports, HBO, and various other broadcasters, that all looked different. Before I started working with them they had designers working in silos in different countries with no central style or experience guide and a complete disconnection from the Ooyala brand look and feel.

If a customer had a range of Ooyala products they all incorporated a different creative direction and user experience in many instances caused much confusion and frustration for the customers.
‍‍

Ooyala's existing approach introduced increased technical and design debt when new optimisations were rolled across multiple applications. I set about strategising how I could solve these challenges.
‍‍

A global design system and new design language for the product ecosystem that would be applied to a new product platform.
‍
I created a new global, unified design system to enable the product design and tech team to scale quicker, faster, more consistently and with less technical and design debt. This incorporated easily understood principles in design, interaction and experience. The foundation of the styling would be applied to all components and then scaled across all applications. This also involved me reorganising the team to ensure a more global approach to design thinking and practice and more governance on the design system I'd created at a product design team level.

Firstly, revisiting the disconnected Ooyala brand I determined some key brand creative principles that had been overlooked in the previous product incarnations, namely a common use of logo, palette and typography hierarchy. I then set about creating defining some key styling foundations to ground the new design system and then building out further personality as well as extending the palette to include interface colour palettes, icons, illustrative treatments and component styling. It was important that the look and feel of the design system fully reflected the ethos of the Ooyala's direction so I worked to understand this with the CMO. I also took a deep dive to understand commonalities in actions and interactions that we could begin to define consistently to enable to the users to have a more intuitive experience. I whiteboarded with the global product design team and allowed them to understand what our vision would be, how they could get involved and set about creating workshops to inform engineers, product management and senior stakeholders.

I also spent time with Fox Sports and other clients understanding their core use cases of our products, their frustrations, needs and the tasks they needed prioritised, then set about creating personas to ensure our product evolution solved any challenges they were facing.
‍

The results

The creation of a unified suite of products and consistent design principles used by the Ooyala Product Design team and wider business. The end product won Best Of Show at IBC 2022. Ooyala was acquired by Dalet.

All my projects start with me working to understand the problem we are trying to solve, this could be to create a branded product to cater to a target demographic, to align a brand or product where there is currently a disconnect, to increase conversion or engagement, or just to bring more emotion and unity to digital ecosystem. From that point onwards it's an iterative journey involving me leading on strategy, then defining a vision and overarching direction through working with all levels across the business to ensure the principles are upheld and the way forward is harmonious to create an awesome experience!!
‍
Everything that I do isn't detailed here if you want to find out more get in touch.