Let the crowd introduce you / New York Writes Itself

 A major creative team from Burnett Australia was being relocated to begin the first presence of Leo Burnett in the New York Market. Their idea to introduce the agency was a social platform to engage New Yorkers in telling stories about their city. As director of UX, I collaborated in taking this germ of an idea into a working model, under my guidance we prioritized user stories, rapidly prototyped with Axure and realized a working model in WordPress. Using these Agile processes instead of the traditional agency model paid off with two Gold Cannes Lions in 2012 for social and crowdsourced content.

Our format had to both take place on desktop and mobile. This provided a design challenge on how to create a usable experience for both the users and the moderators that needed to encourage and promote their favorite content pieces. By using templates and responsive design along with some radical simplification of data entry, we were able to capture key elements to tell the location and nuance of the story.

To get the right team in place, I had to wear many hats, both engaging a business analyst to create a data structure and documenting ideas quickly to our back-end developers to modify the  CMS. Time and budget were small but these constraints, along with collaboration with the creative team led to quick decisions and faster time to market. This platform led to a great splash in the hyper-competitive New York market. It became the source for posters, art exhibitions, and a Broadway show. The success of the project led to a partnership with the Village Voice and is now a beloved part of the narrative of the city.