In September 2024, I joined the team at Fluent as a principal UX consultant, spanning strategy and design, to help create and improve digital products and services across a range of industries and purpose-driven clients.
I've been part of the Umbraco community for over a decade, producing several websites using Umbraco CMS. I've been lucky enough to attend four Codegardens, two CODECABINs, and numerous Umbraco festivals and meetups.
I'm currently a member of the Umbraco Community Advisory Board, providing a UX perspective on the upcoming refresh of the Umbraco Community website and other Umbraco community digital channels.
Oct 2000 - Aug 2024
Flag is a leading full-service ESG-specialist agency, based in the UK, USA and Europe, providing expert strategy, reporting and creative communications services to organisations at all stages of their ESG journey.
I joined Flag in October 2000 as a web developer, and my remit grew significantly over my time there. As Flag's digital and technical director, I had a broad range of responsibilities in three main areas.
In my time at Flag, I was privileged to work on digital projects for a wide variety of clients, including large brands such as Amazon, McDonald's, Ford Motor Company, GM, Jaguar Land Rover, L'Oréal, Vodafone, PwC, 3M, Nestlé, Facebook, Tiffany and Cargill.
My responsibilities on the digital side included:
...the McDonald's Flagship Farmers website; a fully content-managed and multilingual website that showcases the sustainable practices followed by farmers and ranchers who supply McDonald's.
...my contribution to the Amazon Sustainability website; a reinvention of their previous website that solidified their brand and provided the strategic presentational flexibility to deliver a variety of different types of content and messaging.
As a senior member of the Flag team, I had a significant part to play in the strategic running of the business.
My business and management responsibilties included:
In order for the business to run efficiently and effectively, it's critical to provide a robust and responsive IT function. And for large brands to work with Flag, we have to be serious about our cybersecurity posture and processes.
My IT and cybersecurity responsibilities included:
2015-2018
City, University of London
Graduated with distinction
Awarded Best Student Prize, Applied Stream, Department of Computer Science
In 2015, I had the opportunity to enrol in a Masters degree course in Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London.
Attending as a part-time student alongside my full-time role at Flag, I was lucky to be able to spend two years acquiring current knowledge from academic and real-world experts in the field. The course included modules on a variety of disciplines, including:
...my data visualisation project, producing a visual and spatial representation of the point-scoring pattern of a game of badminton, and how aggregating that tells a story of a whole tournament.
...my final dissertation project, Get Up and Go: Exploring how ambient persuasive technology can influence sedentary behaviour (2018), which employed a participatory, user-centred design process, informed by medical research and theoretical models of behaviour change, to design, implement, deploy and evaluate a novel ambient persuasive technology intervention aimed at encouraging desk-based workers to break up prolonged bouts of sitting.
© Mike Taylor 2024
