Peter Smith

The aim was to create a single page template that is flexible enough to host a wide variety of content types. It should be skin-able, responsive, easy to manage, and everything should be re-usable.

By defining a set of layout modules, I was able to provide editors with a tool they could use to pick-n-mix content modules, arrange them in any order and easily manage all types of content.

The designer created a layout that uses just a few colors in different ways to create a palette that feels unique.

The editor can select the colors to use in each page and the layout responds accordingly, giving the editor great control over look-and-feel but without allowing them the opting to create something that doesn’t fit well with the designer’s original vision.

Any new functionality that needs to be added to a page should be built in a re-usable way. By sticking strictly to this motto of multi-use it helps keep a common UX and visual language and maximize the tools available.

One module, in particular, allows editors to create columns of images, videos, text, ads and feature content. I use CSS flexbox layouts to create a grid view that responds beautifully and gives an almost unlimited choice of layouts for editorial content.

Creating a personalized user experience is increasingly important when trying to maintain an engaged and loyal audience. More important still is data security and transparency in order to maintain user trust.

This full re-build of the signup and login system required a broad range of skills including building a custom REST API, integrating with Salesforce and an IDAM platform and integrating reporting and audit trail logging.

Creating a beautiful and engaging user experience is the first step to enticing users to sign up. Ensuring they have an easy route to update their preferences and unsubscribe is also really important.

We tested several designs and user flows which we continue to tweak with A/B tests to ensure maximum conversion.

This was all accomplished alongside the introduction of the GDPR which meant especially strict adherence to legal processes.

This project for BAFTA involved building a system that professional media organizations could use to upload, transcode, and distribute videos and other media content in the cloud.

The services are closely linked to Amazon’s suite of cloud computing products including S3, Cloudfront, SQS, Glacier, and EC2.

The services are scalable, secure, and reliable with great API interfaces allowing us to access them via PHP and JavaScript.

The front end of the site is built in Backbone which allows us to create a completely static codebase which can be distributed via S3. The JavaScript interacts with the data via a custom API build in Symfony.

Since this service is aimed at media professionals, we need to offer them as much control as possible over the transcoding settings. A powerful UX was developed that allows all the major encoding properties to be customized. Users can also create “hot folders” which will encode any videos uploaded to a defined set of formats.

Videos can be played in the file manager using an HTML5 video player, and they can also be distributed and embedded in third-party websites via some embed code which will provide various encoded versions of the file for different bandwidth requirements.

I developed this bot for the Facebook Messenger platform so that users could chat with Jamie Oliver, send him emojis, and in return, they’d get recipe inspiration, videos, and tips.

We used rapid prototyping to prove the concept, then we were able to quickly build this out into a deployable product within a matter of weeks.

Since the UX is already in place within the Messenger environment it meant we could concentrate on the content and produce a really fun tool that people seem to love interacting with.

I built a fairly simple node API which listens out for requests from Facebook and parses relevant responses.

This is deployed into an auto-scaling group within AWS so that we can be confident that it will deal with any traffic spikes.

In order for the conversation to feel natural we populated the bot with a bunch of pre-defined responses for certain inputs then anything else would query our database for recipes that might be a good match. There were several funny responses dropped in there as Easter eggs to keep people interested too.