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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Once again working with nice people at One/Fifty Consultancy. This time Harvester wanted to launch a new salad, but needed the punters' he;lp in deciding what should be in it. So I built a fullstack HTML mini-site that allows users to vote on the combinations they want to see in their new salad. We gave them a selection of choices rather than free range - none of this "Boaty McBoatface" stuff happening on our watch!

During the voting period the users, after choosing the best new salad combo, get their vote tallied up in the leaderboard which shows the real-time current combination.

As with any modern media agency, One/Fifty Consultancy like to get lots of analytics to show the ROI to their clients. Luckily I LOVE adding analytics for everything I can think of. So the client ended up with a nice analytics page to show the users' 'funnel', page loads, votes and sharing to socials. The app is, obviously, fully responsive and works on all devices, including iOS and Android.

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I seem to have an X'mas tradition of making some fun little "cracker pull" games for 3 popular restaurants in the Mitchells & Butlers' stable: Toby Carvery, Harvester, and Stonehouse.

Working for the 3rd Christmas in a row with the loverly people at One/Fifty Consultancy to bring a little X'mas cheer to all the customers in the form of a little cracker game that gives them a new restaurant voucher each week and also an unlimited amount of cheesy festive jokes!

As this is the third year running these games (and I love making analytics KPIs) we can get some insight in the user habits when playing the games. Each year the games surpass 2 million vouchers claimed which obviously make the user and the client very happy. I’m not as happy as I can see most people are there for the vouchers and no where near enough come purely for the X’mas jokes! …although I may have skewed the analytics on this one 😉

The games are embedded in the restaurants’ app from where the user gets to play against their friend to win the voucher …or just sneakily play it alone to make sure you get the bonus! I developed the game play, animation and also the backend API that saves which users have won that week to make sure no one gets too greedy.

The game also then jumps off to a holiday competition from Jet2 Holidays and also branded filters for Insta and TikTok.

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From my original interface concept UI design, I produced an exciting learning tool for 11-14 year olds to learn about the UK and it's places of interest they can visit. The spinning menu and zooming map are an exciting way into the roughly 2000 pieces of database driven content. This flagship application of gridClub.com helped the site walk away with a BAFTA, a BETT and an Emma Foundation award.

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I was tasked with bringing a very well established maths tutoring site up to date and into the mobile age. After an initial period of R&D, I designed and built a flexible and scalable UI with a full example tutorial ready for user testing and demoing to investors.

The tutorials are step by step and reactive; they will explain the same point in another way, with supporting animation, if the user didn't quite understand the first time. Technically it had to work on desktop, tablets and mobiles with an emphasis on the varied mobiles in use in schools around the globe. This spawned lots of problems in the design; trying to avoid just going for the lowest common denominator and keeping the highly engaging flow and animation to aid the understanding and retention of the lesson. The UI can work in both portrait and landscape and has a 'split' bar so the user can fine-tune the UI themselves, throughout the lessons, if they prefer the emphasis to be on the tutorial's animation and explanation or the accompanying (multi-lingual) text explanation. Flexible guided learning is key here.

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