Neil Chalk

Project to help students and recent graduates create awesome online profiles. Bashfully aims to give the traditional online resume a bit of a shake-up. We are doing this with guided profile creation and interesting visualizations. Along with relevant integrations to show off portfolio pieces.

We successfully delivered a technical and user experience overhaul of the product's main user portal. This covered the key user experiences of:
* Content management
* Reference data management
* User management
* Ad-hoc manual notification sending, where the main user journey went from a 3-stage process with at least 14 clicks to a single process with a minimum of four clicks.

This also built a solid foundation for later enhancements to the product. This project also changed the way of being entirely multi-tenanted with continuous delivery for gaining quick feedback. This launched with five European-based airlines in four months.

A key achievement was porting a central component from legacy VB6 code to VB.NET, including some key enhancements to dynamic content functionality. My contribution was to introduce simple programming concepts into the template language used. This included responsibility for preserving existing functionality and designing the enhancements to increase the range of notifications possible. To date, this component has been central to sending hundreds of millions of ticket, email, voice, SMS, and print notifications a year.

To see the impact of this project, look in your email or on your phone. Chances are, if you've booked a ticket or flown in the past year, you will have had one of 15below's notifications.

Created a marketing site that included a calculator for illustrating the fee structure of using the embedded finance service. This used no code and low code solutions to deploy without dedicated development resources and ultra-low-cost hosting requirements. There is also a member's only dashboard with flight search integration via a third-party data feed.

Collaboration systems are a key part of a knowledge management strategy. The focus is often on the content of the documents and associated metadata; this paper examines how other knowledge in the form of the interaction of the project collaborators can be used. Design issues in the storytelling as a method of imparting this knowledge were discussed, and desirable features in
database systems put forward.

Given the interest in artificial intelligence, 15below's customers were asking for guidance on how this could create business value. So, Neil created a briefing document for 15below customers on the possible uses of artificial intelligence in travel tech.

Likewise, as social media started to replace email and SMS in personal communication, 15below's customers were seeking answers in how they could use this to improve customer service. Neil then created a briefing document for 15below customers on the usage of social media in passenger communications, detailing the use cases, processes, and different networks used around the globe.

Both of these were printed as booklets and distributed at 15below hosted workshops and user conferences.

The research and development project re-imagined the functionality for an established platform from the ground up. Ultimately the research was not used directly, but tools and techniques trialed here were integrated into the legacy platform to reduce costs and improve performance.

Neil created a framework that allowed third-party content, such as car hire or hotel rooms, to be inserted into email notifications without any further development as a support configuration change. This contrasted with competitor products that had hard-coded email content at the time.