The Challenge

Umi Digital was invited to tender for a large-scale platform rebuild for GapYear.com but didn’t have the in-house development capacity to deliver it alone. I was brought in as a freelance UX/IA lead to work alongside an external development team on a platform that was genuinely complex: taxonomy-based search replacing rigid categories, partner and affiliate content management, dynamic personalisation, and third-party API integrations. Two very different audiences, the client and an outside dev team, both needed to understand exactly what was being built.

The Outcome

The clearest evidence of success: this engagement led directly into a full-time return to Umi Digital the following year as Head of User Experience, a strong signal the work was well received. Specific launch metrics for the platform itself aren’t available to cite here.

The Approach

Rather than relying on static wireframes, I built a fully functioning WordPress prototype, including real custom post types, so both the client and the development team could see exactly how content would be structured and where it would appear, not just what it would look like. I designed for two audiences at once: the public-facing search and browsing experience, and the internal CMS experience the client’s own team would use to create tours, products and SEO pages, treating the usability of the backend as seriously as the front end. This gave both sides a precise, working specification to build and sign off against, rather than an abstract brief.