Eddy Gibson
Product designer with an entrepreneurial background, a commercial mindset, and a passion for creating user-centred experiences that support a successful business.
Good design makes for good business, and a first class experience is crucial to achieve commercial objectives and meet user needs.
I’m a critical thinker who can ask the right questions to understand the problem, and turn the insights into design solutions with creativity and innovation.
Today’s Media
Today’s Media is a legal publishing company providing specialist pre-written content for legal practitioners to use in their marketing channels. The content was originally delivered manually via email, with a time-consuming and convoluted process.
I proposed the idea of automating this, and following the end-to-end design process I devised the concept for a subscription website to deliver the monthly articles, with a landing page to drive sign-ups.
IDR Network
The IDR Network is a content resource for legal practitioners, providing support with will disputes. As the resource grew, navigation of the content became difficult, and I was hired to improve the information architecture.
Categorising legal content is tricky for a non-legal person, so I made use of their 20 strong team of lawyers, with a series of card sorts and group exercises to tackle the problem, and align the content and navigation with user goals.
Fly UX
For my UX diploma project I designed an airline website, and familiarised myself with UX research, and the core principles of user-centred design. The project focused on the flight booking process: how users search for, find and select flights.
My approach was to discover in detail the exact steps a person takes from the moment they decide to go on a trip, through to getting their flights booked up, and using the insights to design a seamless solution.
Background
The better the product, the more you will sell.
The easier it is to buy, the more people will buy it.
Its that simple.
Like most people who start a business, when I started selling school portraits in 2008 I wanted to sell as many as possible, and take as much revenue as possible.
With school photography, you don’t take payment upfront. You spend the day shooting, then another day preparing the proofs, and then the school hand them out to parents.
Then you have to sit back and wait. And hope that as many people order the photographs as possible.
There are lots of barriers, and lots of reasons why people may not order. They might just not like the photographs, but lots of other things can stop them too.
- They may have forgotten about photo day, and sent their children in wearing scruffy clothes or without brushing their hair.
- They may put the paper contact sheet in a pile of letters and forget all about it.
- They might not have a cheque book, so can’t return the envelope with the payment.
- They might fill out the cheque, but accidentally put the envelope in a pile of letters and forget all about it.
- They might not understand the ordering instructions, and return to dealing with their toddler instead of trying to make sense of it.
- They might not understand how the different packages work and lose trust, feeling that they are being ripped off.
- They might not be familiar with logging in to a website and making their order online.
- They might get interrupted by their toddler mid-way through trying to make an order on the website, and forget to complete it.
- They might not be able to view the Flash image gallery on their new iPhone, and give up trying to order. (RIP Flash)
- Or they might get confused by the online checkout process, and go to attend to their toddler again.
I recently received this email. It is before I had the Bounce Photography domain, so must be 2009. The boy in the pictures is probably UX lead in a fintech company.
So when I started my business, long before I’d heard of UX or customer journeys, before I’d given any thought to web design or ecommerce, before I’d considered operational communications or automated emails – long before any of that, I knew that in order to sell as many photographs as possible, I had to tackle that list.
- I designed eye-catching posters to clearly advertise photo day.
- I wrote engaging leaflets to hand out to the parents, spelling out exactly how the service would work and how much it would cost.
- I devised simple, understandable packages that people understood.
- I wrote clear instructions on the order forms, with simple, concise copy.
- I learnt HTML & CSS to build a website and advertise the business.
- I set up an ecommerce site to sell the photos online, long before other school photography companies dared try online proofing.
- I simplified and shortened the login and order process every year, with incremental improvements to the online order process.
- I designed and built a database to manage the thousands of photographs, customers and orders each year.
- I hired developers to implement new features and plugin customisations, for front and back-end.
- I set up SMS and email reminders to increase the number of orders.
- I devised automated emails to confirm orders and manage expectations.
- I listened to feedback every year to refine the whole process and make improvements to our service.
- I tracked the sales and conversion as we adjusted the communications and website, to measure the success of our efforts.
- I ran A/B tests on email copy, landing page content and paper order forms to optimise the journey.
- And I designed an all-in-one WordPress platform to run this entire process and more, all from our own website.
It was my interest in tackling that list and selling more photographs that led me to keep running our photography business for fourteen years. I was far more interested in tackling that list than I was in photography. I was so interested in fact, I made sure that our system was simpler, easier and more flexible than all the other school photography platforms on the market, and started planning how we could white label the whole system and sell it to other photographers.
When the pandemic hit and the schools closed, I had some hard questions to answer about what to do next. I’d invested so much time and money into the platform, but the inevitable growth of Smartphones meant that the volume photography market was in terminal decline. I could carry on, but how many websites would I sell?
When an advert for the UX Design Institute turned up in my Facebook feed, it was a lightbulb moment. In terms of the purpose behind UX, it put a name to what I had been doing all those years to tackle that list.
I could take my customer-centric approach and intuitive sense for the best way to sell products, along with my interest in ecommerce and digital technology, and pursue a career in what I was truly interested in.
I added to the list of skills I’d learnt over the years, learning user-centred design, interaction design, information architecture, prototyping, visual design & more.
More tools in the toolkit to help design products that people want to buy, and design customer journeys that make them easier to buy.
Bounce Photography
School photography requires workflow solutions to run the portrait sales process.
I designed and built a WordPress ecommerce site with a multi-channel customer journey for online proofing and order management.
Education
UXDI diploma – 2021 – Overall grade 92%
Creative Music & Sound Technology Bsc Hons – 2.1 2002-2005
Music technology BTEC National Diploma – 2000-2002
Information technology BTEC National diploma IT 1998-2000
I learnt basic principles of coding, C++, Visual Basic, COBOL etc. Databases, and introduction to computer science.
SchoolDiary
Practice UI project designing a mobile app that automatically organises emails from school.
They said ‘identify a user problem that doesn’t seem to have an existing solution’, and this could be a good one…
Television sound
Before starting my school photography business, I worked freelance as 2nd Boom/sound assistant on several drama productions. I moved from sound into photography following a tinnitus diagnosis.
Waterloo Road
True Dare Kiss
Mansfield Park
Emmerdale
The Innocence Project
Magnolia
Hollyoaks
Shed Productions
BBC Productions
Company Pictures
ITV Productions
Tightrope
BBC
Lime Pictures
2007
2007
2006
Dailies throughout 2006-2007
2006
2006
2006
Photography
During my time running a photography business I developed an eye for visual composition, learnt Adobe Suite, carried out briefs for corporate clients, collaborated with agencies, and had bucket loads of practice running photoshoots – putting subjects at ease and directing large groups of people.
In my spare time
DJing – finding connections between unrelated music and bringing it together into one whole.
Amatuer tinkering with video. My biggest regret in life is not ever directing a film. I wish I was Dickie Laxton.