Creative Director, Interaction & Experience Designer, Storyteller & Photographer

Over 12 years working in the field of interactive web design and development, my career has taken me from small startup companies to the heights of my current role as Creative Director at the online entertainment powerhouse Bodog. Working globally from London to Vancouver, BC, I've transitioned from Interaction Designer, through establishing and leading Bodog's first Usability team, to inspiring a team of user centered practitioners as the creative lead responsible for re-defining the vision of a billion dollar organization.

During this time, I've honed my skills and methodologies to facilitate getting the most out of the interactive medium and the creative teams that fuel it, while being dedicated to ensuring business requirements meet user goals at every level.

Jump down to:

Goals |

Recent Roles |

Noteable Accomplishments |

Key Skills |

Reference Quotes

Goals

A summary of my values and where I see myself positioned for maximum effect. I seek to...

develop a high performance creative ethos where teams rally round a set of common values and dare to innovate.
inspire teams to become brand ambassadors for the client, and to be expert in all facets of their operation.
be part of a team that loves what it does every day and desires to be the future creators of world class products and experiences.
bring dedication to the measurement of successes, by how well they directly impact the objectives of the business.

Noteable Accomplishments

A list summarising some of the impacts my work has had on team and business success.

Vision
Recognised for bringing a new creative vision to Bodog, helping to reshape the brand direction and take product innovation to a new level.
Breaking new ground
To gain a competitive advantage in the gaming industry through enhanced user experience, I established the first Usability team at Bodog. Through a study of the Sportsbook, I analyzed the time taken to make a simple single bet on a player's favourite team. As a result we reduced the average time from 7-10 minutes to under 1 minute.
Creative Process
Developed a creative conceptual development process based on best practices. This process led to the creative concept document and pitch, heralded company-wide as being the best they had ever seen.
Infrastructure
Built a product framework specification to define the component parts of a web based interactive gaming product. This allows for both consistent implementation a of multi-channel web experience, and a targeted approach to coordinating content and concept planning for a single channel operation.

Key Skills

What am I good at? The list below identifies areas where I have excelled during recent times.

Expert Facilitator
After learning from an expert in the field, I have taken methodologies from companies such as IDEO and adapted them to produce superb results. In addition I have developed a suite of supplementary tools to aid the process.
Read about my brainstorming process
Interaction Design
I practice a thoughtful and iterative approach to product and web interaction. Using detailed wireframes, user flow diagrams and interactive prototypes as part of a pre-production process.
View wireframe examples and prototypes
Storytelling and the Art of the Pitch
Stories are fundamental to effective and entertaining communication. This approach was a key part of the success of my pitch for the global redesign of bodoglife.com, through the production of an 84 page full-colour printed spoof issue of Fast Company magazine.
View the magazine in the portfolio section
Conceptual Development
There is a great idea within close reach of even the craziest thought, and it's my job to wade through the confusion to find it. Using a proven and results-driven process, I can be confident of finding the right solution to any business problem.
Read about the conceptual development process

Reference Quotes

Below are a sample of some quotes I have received from professional colleagues, mentors and bosses during my career.

His energy is infectious. In one legendary pitch for the new Bodog global website, Oli had the entire senior executive team pumping their fists and shouting 'F**k Yeah' throughout the presentation.

Aaron Gould, Chief Marketing Officer, Bodog

Oli is a phenomenal inspiration. He combines classic usability methodology with unbelievable intuition and flare for design. He is a point of reference in the company for design and his passion for it is embodied in everything he does, whether it be UIs or photography. An absolute joy and privilege to work with, he is in a league of his own in an incredibly specialized field.

Kathryn Loewen, former Poker Product Manager, Bodog

Innovation: Second to none in his ability to think creatively. You can count on Oli to contradict common thinking and find new, innovative ways to solve any range of problems.

Aaron Gould, Chief Marketing Officer, Bodog

Oli has the ability to work directly with Marketing, Sales and Business units of any organization which helps to ensure that the worlds of business, marketing, design and user interaction all meet. Working with Oli in the past has always a very positive experience.

Dan Nedelko, Director, Honeypot Marketing

... stakeholders were impressed with his ability to tap into the brand DNA of the company. Sitting in on many of his brainstorming sessions was remarkable to watch, as he pulled out some of the most imaginative ideas the company had ever considered.

John Keyes, former Director of User Experience, Bodog

Recent Roles

As the creative lead for Bodog's flagship global website, bodoglife.com, my primary mission is to define the creative vision for the site and in essence the company, by leveraging research data from my stakeholders.

To redefine the brand direction of a company of this size, two major initiatives were undertaken; a conceptual development phase and the creation of an online gaming product framework. The first to seek out the next 1-5 years worth of new work to be done, the second to build a flexible infrastructure to support consistent growth across a suite of 5-10 entertainment and gaming products.

In the portfolio section, I provide more detailed examples of the work done and discuss the results of the creative process.

It's a common feeling. Seeing something and instinctively knowing that it's wrong. When you couple that with an instinctive knowledge of how to fix the problem, be it from experience or just a gut reaction, you have to start acting on it. It was with this emotion that I insisted that I be given the opportunity to be Bodog's resident usability expert. Having worked with some of the best practitioners in the country, I worked quickly to establish the discipline as a fundamental requirement in our User Experience arsenal.

After my first research study of the Bodog Sportsbook - presented with the aid of video footage and statistical analysis of user performance - almost caused our president to have a heart attack (brought on by watching the inability of new users to perform even the simplest task that we thus far took for granted), I was quickly encouraged to build an entire team to ensure Bodog had a relentless focus on the usability of its products.

As the first role of its kind in a fast growing company, I was tasked with developing an approach for improving the interaction and flow of the more complex areas of the bodoglife.com site. This included designing an interactive Poker tournament schedule, analyzing how people interacted with the Sports betting process and optimizing the sign up process to improve acquisition performance.

I learned the importance of using a technique known as Contextual Inquiry (an anthropological usability technique) to observe and interview users in their 'natural' environment and perform interviews to uncover the context of use. Over the coming years it would be flattering to witness the number of competitors mimicking our approach with virtually identical processes.

Having been a photographer since first visiting Canada in 1996, I jumped at the opportunity to do it full-time. I got to travel all over the US photographing and residing in 5-star hotels.

Having turned circles (literally) doing 360 degree panoramic images or bedrooms for a few months, I finally came to the realization (while lying under a desk in Philadelphia taping phone wires out of view) that this particular photography job wasn't for me. The next gig was in Barbados and I said no, giving you a sense of how little fun it really was.

A great experience nonetheless.

I joined this impressive startup in its more mature phase, just as it was being acquired by TELUS. Through some inspired teachings, I took one very valuable thing from my time there that remains onf of my truest lessons to date and one that I encourage others to follow.

Simply put, as a developer, you should always produce a web page that is a pixel perfect rendition of a designers comp. Not only is it a creative and technical challenge to do so, but it will delight designers and stakeholders alike.