Scott.
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Wakakuu
Wakakuu is a new retailer of high-end womens' fashion in Göteborg, and they tasked CP+B with not only building their online storefront, but to help them build their brand from the ground up: brand strategy, business planning, showroom design, identity, product packaging, traditional/digital advertising, social media strategies, and website development.
This site presented some very unique opportunities for discovering technical solutions to design challenges. The CMS the site is running on didn't support a number of ideas the creative team had for the site (infinite scrolling, product grid generated via Ajax call, etc.) which brought members of the technical team into the forefront of the site design and planning early on in the process which, if you're familiar with advertising agencies, actually never happens.
- Role: Technical Director, Architect
- Duties:
- Recruitment and oversight of internal technical staff, including contractor hiring
- Technical leadership and ownership of all code/architecture planning and decision making
- Communication and collaboration with internal design/creative team members, external service providers, and client representatives to identify challenges, maintain expectations, address concerns, and make things awesome.
- Overall technical strategic roadmap design
- Timeline estimation preparation
- HTML/CSS/Javascript architecture planning & implementation
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American Express
https://www304.americanexpress.com/BusinessApps/AppCenter/Home
CP+B has done a lot of work helping American Express promote their services for small buisness owners, and this project was a part of that. We built a microsite that showcases a number of online financial apps that entrepeneurs can use to help run their businesses. The goal was to provide a lot of information in an easy-to-navigate manner, and one of the challenges was building a fairly complex navigation system that would function both with and without the use of Javascript. Along with that, being a large financial institution, American Express has stringent technical, security, and performance restrictions and requirements that needed to be taken into consideration as we explored implementation solutions.
The other interesting challenge for me personally on this project was that the entire team (except me) was working out of our office in Boulder, CO, which meant I had to deal with the 8-hour time difference when communicating with the rest of my team.
- Role: Technical Architect
- Duties:
- Oversight of technical staff
- Communication and collaboration with creative/design team members to identify challenges in implementation early on in the process and provide solution options
- Timeline estimation preparation
- HTML/CSS/Javascript architecture planning & implementation
- Standards-based animation - the "carousel" of screenshots on the homepage is pure Javascript and CSS. I built an animation manager framework that not only advances the carousel on a timer, but also brings the screenshot associated with the tab a user selects to the forefront. After it was complete, another Tech Director looked at the page and was concerned because we weren't supposed to use Flash for animation on this project. :D
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adidas training
Note: this site is no longer online.
The goal of this project was to begin migrating adidas' Sports Performance category websites (Women's Training, Men's Training, Running, Basketball, Football, Baseball, Tennis, etc.) to a global, common platform. In the past, all of these sites were maintained by separate agencies and there was no consistency between them. adidas' desire was to unify their category sites and provide a more consistent user experience between them. Also, since these sites were all entirely built in Flash, there was no way to make quick, reactive updates.
As the lead Project Engineer for this client, I was tasked with planning and building the XHTML/Ajax templating system that all of the adidas sites would eventually be powered by.
One of the biggest challenges with this project was building a system that would allow for localisation. All of these sites were available in multiple languages, also allowing individual local markets to populate sites in their locale with region-specific information.
- Role: Lead Project Engineer
- Duties:
- Planning technology roadmaps for the scope of the entire project
- Produce and propose timelines for implementation
- Hire, onboard, supervise, and direct contract and full-time staff (both local and remote)
- Lead Ajax developer - determining needs, roadblocks, and solutions to development obstacles
- Work closely as the liason between design and development teams to ensure realistic goals are being produced
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adidas basketball
Note: these sites are no longer online.
A much different project than any other adidas work I'd been involved in, the Basketball site is an entirely XML-driven Flash application. 180 Amsterdam inherited this site from another agency, and since taking it over we've added many different facets of functionality (localized content, data-driven surveys, functional updates to the product grids, etc.) as well as general improvements to performance and structure.
The Basketball site also gave us many opportunities to tie into Social Media platforms. For example, during the NBA All-star Weekend, we had NBA All-star Dwight Howard armed with a video-enabled mobile phone taking photos, videos, and sending Twitter messages all weekend. We were able to aggregate all of his created content and, in real time, have a team of translators adapting his content into thirteen different languages for display on adidasbasketball.com.
- Role: Project Engineer
- Duties:
- Hire, onboard, supervise, and direct contract and full-time staff (both local and remote)
- XML content management
- Flash/Actionscript development
- Developed the system for content aggregation during All-star Weekend, including Mobile development
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Panasonic
Prior to Critical Mass's involvement with Panasonic, the Panasonic Customer Support website was consistently scoring very low in usability studies, and Panasonic had received a high volume of negative feedback from their customer base regarding their ability to find relevant, useful information on the site.
Critical Mass was tasked with redesigning the entire Support section of panasonic.com in order to increase customer satisfaction. This involved a complete rebuild of how their Search technology (Endeca) was implemented along with building tools such as a Model Number Locator and an easily-navigated menu of product types.
- Role: Technical Project Lead
- Duties:
- Primary client contact on all technical discussions
- Wrote all functional specs at outset of the project
- Wrote all technical documentation handed off to client upon project completion
- Participated in and supervised usability studies
- Assigned developers to the project based on skillsets and current milestone deliverables
- Onboarded and supervised development staff
- Worked closely with design staff, project managers, and account managers to maintain project timelines and ensure delivery of high-quality work
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göteborg.com
A Google Maps-based social project for the Göteborg tourism association showing off the highlights of the city. Users can take photographs of their favorite place ("smultron" means "strawberry" in Swedish, yet "smultronställen" means "favorite places"... go figure) and upload it along with a description and location on the map. You can then browse locations on the map and vote for places that you also like.
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Club Scania
A social community for Scania truck drivers. Jokingly referred to as "Truckbook" during development. Currently only available in German, but eventually will be translated into 10+ languages.
