Vertu makes the world’s best luxury mobile phones which come with carefully selected exclusive experiences, offers, and assistance to enhance the Vertu customer’s lifestyle. However, in a product-focussed culture services were yet to be considered as a strategic offering to increase stickiness.

Reliance on generic market research data & negligible usage data from devices meant offering on Vertu Life was almost identical for every customer & CRM initiatives were not targeted.

In the hands of private equity investors, there was a renewed emphasis on services as a key offering. 

1. Significant investment was made into targetted market research inivitives
2. Set-up of a robust analytics platform and a workflow to cater to internal consumers - design, marketing & CRM teams
3. Sync data across systems for one-view of a user across the organisation

The onus was on UX to 
1. Improve barriers to registration (and thereby usage of services)
2. Contextual data capture by persuasive UI design & copy
3. Add highly-visible personalization tools to increase stickiness

The on-device registration experience was plagued by a number of issues:

- Cumbersome process with several steps 
- Low discovery post initial skip
- Zero contextual data capture
- Inconsistency in description & usage of terms
- Disconnect between software, customer services & marketing initiatives

So it was back to the drawing board to understand user goals & business goals in the context of personas available. The key user journey was charted and the different methods of information gathering were agreed upon by all stakeholders. 

To cater to the needs of different systems (between which the user data is shared) & operational teams within the organisation, an information audit was done. Information elements were grouped, their triggers listed and capture scenarios were documented. 

Contextual & topical capture of information across different customer touch points  - including customer services & Concierge was listed down. And a plan to implement this in several phases was drawn. 

For the very first stage, an app called Account was created to make it easy for the users to manage the information they choose to share with Vertu. Entry points from all the other services were created to drive home the point that it was a common information pool that was utilised for delivering a personalized service. 

A few other things that I convinced others to do

1. Create a user friendly query interface on analytics
2. Set-up regular sessions between analytics, software, design & marketing
 

A host of integrated security features and services on the phone to help provide peace of mind for globe trotting high net worth individuals. Despite many of the offerings being complimentary, uptake was low. Services that were well received during interviews with customer panels were suffering from low adoption. 

Upon investigating, it came to light that:
- Discover-ability of services was low
- Complimentary nature of several offerings were not understood
- Contact options were confusing
- Design of the app was not visually appealing

Steps were taken to address these issues and a complete revamp of the design was undertaken. A dashboard style view for all partner services was finalized. 

Sign-up rates increased by over 100%.  Business of over £100,000 was realised within 3 months of the release of the new version of the app on Vertu Constellation. 

SITA, founded as Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques, is the world's leading specialist in air transport communications and IT solutions. 

A suite of products was being developed under a multi-year USD200M+ programme to deliver the next generation of products for the air transport industry.

A 9-member globally distributed UX team supporting over 500+ developers in 5 countries was working on 10+ products. I was leading & managing this team to ensure a consistent & unified user experience across all products. 

Maintaining consistency of look, feel and behaviour across products being developed by multiple vendors in different locations is a challenge. 

A few ways this was addressed: 
- Creating UI standards & guidelines and UI patterns to be followed across product teams
- Evangelising the need for consistent user experience among other teams viz. development, testing, project management & business definition. Creating checklists to make it easy to play their part
- Setting up an enabling project that developed, owned and supported the library of common UI components & frameworks
- Developing specifications for screen layout & usage guidelines for UI components
- Tweaking the UX processes and governance structures 
- Setting up weekly reviews of all UI artifacts from different project teams for compliance to standards
- Defining templates for all UI deliverables and stencils/ widgets for prototyping

Sabre® Red™ Workspace is the award-winning travel agency desktop unveiled by Sabre in June 2010. It's used by 120,000 travel agents in 114 countries. 

For Sabre® Red™ Workspace, Sabre was ranked No. 31 on the Information Week 500 list for business technology vision and innovation as well as the execution of IT practices.

Sabre won the Business Travel & Meetings Show Innovation Award for Sabre® Red™ Workspace, in the “Technology for Travel and Meetings” category.

Sabre® Red™ is a customizable workspace that provides flexibility to a travel agency to control which set of tools are visible and available to each individual agent. Agents see only those tools that are relevant to their workflow. Intuitive user experience is among it's USPs. 

I worked on creating the basic layout of the workspace with main task area and secondary tasks/ reference information panels. Created & managed experience design guidelines that was followed by all product teams to modify their existing products for making them available on Sabre Red.

Some of the innovative aspects of the new workspace were 
- Active Assistant Tools - during the agent’s workflow, the application presents the right tools at the right time.
- Unified Agent Notifications framework - all notifications are delivered at one place with only the most critical ones presented upfront.

Also worked on designing the experience of migrating from the older My Sabre web-based system to the desktop-based Sabre Red Workspace.

Also, designed the product used by Sabre Administrators and Agency Administrators to manage agents - their configuration, access, entitlements etc. 

We performed 2 rounds of usability testing - some in person and others remotely to test the new workspace with travel agents. Some major design decisions were made based on the outcome of these tests.