York's new immersive VR entertainment destination, obilViaR, needed a website to match the excitement of its virtual reality experiences. Tasked with bringing the vibrant vision of web designer Lucy Rigley to life, I developed a bespoke Laravel website with a focus on creating an overall feeling of depth and fluidity, mirroring the engaging nature of the virtual reality experiences offered. This vision translated into the incorporation of smooth, airy animations, designed to captivate visitors and hint at the fluid nature of virtual reality itself.

As always, it is easier to create a database to ensure a simple dynamic management of games and experiences. Despite a rapid project turnaround, the site seamlessly integrates a third-party booking system, providing a smooth and efficient user journey from browsing to booking a VR adventure. The obilViaR website serves as the digital gateway to York's only dedicated VR experience, inviting both first-timers and seasoned VR enthusiasts to discover the immersive fun that awaits.

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Stadler rail needed an easy to use system for keeping track of the running condition, defects and cleanliness of their rolling stock.

Using my OnSight reporting system as a base, I developed a bespoke PWA and SaaS system that allows the client to keep track of all their rolling stock in one digital place. This gives the employees a very user-friendly way to input data as they repair and clean the rolling stock. It gives management a clear overview, along with graphed KPIs and historical tabled data, of the state of each carriage. The system also gives some BI perception of where potential bottlenecks occur over single carriages and the whole stock.

The system is fully responsive and works on all devices, including iOS and Android for the front end reporting and any higher resolution displays for the admin backend. The system has been running for over 3 years now without any hick-ups or complaints and we are excited to further develop it's remit in the future.

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ACCA, the global body for accountants, have hundreds of designers working around the globe on various branded work. To help keep this brand consistent, I was tasked by Barley Partners, the brand guardians, to create an online space where the latest brand guidelines could be quickly updated and distributed to all the locally based designers in each region.

Barley are great to work along side and gave me a long-leash in the functionality and UXD of the CMS - as long as it was clean and up to their standards, everyone was happy - especially the final client, the brand manager of ACCA. Very happy clients is always the goal :)

The system is a versioning content resource management system (CRM), as such it keeps a track of each new upload item (digital brand guidelines, video assets etc) and versions each new update to existing items. Each user’s download is also tracked so the system can show users that are new to them and give ACCA a real-time overview of who is missing the latest update or hasn’t downloaded the files they should be using. This all helps keep the brand’s voice consistent on a global scale.

Thanks to the success of the initial system, the client commissioned a further phase of the project. This second part is to facilitate the automatic sending out of emails to sets of people on the main email list (the designers around the globe). So I built a bespoke email system that allows the client a simple but flexible CMS for building branded emails that can then be sent out to groups of people as needed. For instance, if the email is to inform video operators that there are some new assets they may want to use, we\’d only send this to the relevant people. As I quite enjoy tracking analytics to gain some business insight, I added the ability to see who had opened the email and the ability for the client to add tracking to any part of the email, normally a call to action button saying “download the new assets”.

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Core systems was developed from a very exact client brief that had everything they needed to digitally run national civil engineering contracts without a hitch …well, more importantly, with a system that can handle the unknown hiccups that would inevitably crop up on such large projects.

I designed the front end to be clean, simple and most of all: user-friendly. My user experience design always puts the users first; this is a working tool and not a pretty marketing campaign. I built the front-end in a mixture of HTML5 and javascript for realtime interaction with the API backend, built by an off-shore company.

The system is very comprehensive, covering the whole scope from start to finish of the contract. From client database, proposal, baseline timetable and costs forecasts and digital contracts before the work started. Once the on-site work was underway the system tracked every aspect of the job digitally, it is important to have a perfect trail of documents for this type of work for transparency and audit reasons, as the end clients are often public or govt. bodies but also when managing projects with budgets into the millions, you need to be able to see where the cost has gone. Included were a daily work diary to log all workers’ hours on-site, a ‘change request’ system with various automatically generated impact assessments and dynamic graphs and tables clearly showing costs and time efforts.

The system has a real-time summary overview and can generate more in-depth weekly progress reports, giving the managers an invaluable oversight week on week, to help them spot and solve problems before they become large issues. The system also has to handle the raising of invoices and tracking of payment against each change request and timetabled payment, this was logged per instance but also I generated the culmative data into tables and graphs for user ease - designing a user-friendly system is about putting the correct information in front of the user just as much as it is making sure they can navigate the system with ease.

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To help streamline the the day to day business for its employees, Merseyrail tasked me with designing and building an Android app for phonebook look up. There were a few complications to be considered; namely phones don't always have data connections underground where a fair amount of employers are. I solved this problem by running a local couch database on the device. Each month (and first-run) the app checks if it has a data connection and if it does, it will sync with the latest contact data and update it's local database ready for off-line use again. I wrote the API for this and also the backend PHP to query Merseyrail's Active Directory/LDAP employee directory to make sure we had up to date information.

The client also needed bespoke lists of extra contact details beyond the bulk Active Directory numbers, list of station phone numbers, emergency numbers etc. For these I employed a bespoke database for quick access and fed this into the API so all the data came from the single source as far as the app was concerned.

The app utilises 2 factor authentication for added security of the senstive data; utilsing Google Authenticator API as well as generating QR codes for quick scanning. Administering the day-to-day contact details was done via Microsoft Active Directory. But the client needed a bespoke web-based admin interface to curate and update the bespoke lists of contacts. For this I designed and built a the CMS as a single page web app (using mostly HTML5, javascript/jQuery, php & mySQL) with a focus on an easy to use UI to help avoid training costs for the client.

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