Web Strategy
Giles is a Web Strategist at Intergen. He has been in the interactive and online media business since 1998, having worked at some of New Zealand’s premier interactive, web and creative communications agencies.
Despite the title, Giles is more interested in your content, your objectives and your users (or ‘people’ as he often calls them) than technology per se. Giles has worked right across the interactive spectrum on projects including corporate intranets, public-facing websites, e-commerce projects, rich-media applications, online campaigns, real-time media, social media platforms, kiosks and games.
Giles’ experience covers the entire gambit of ‘front-end’ website and application design including:
- User Research / Customer Profiling
- Web Strategy / Social Media Strategy
- Competitive / Market Analysis
- Interaction Design / User Experience
- Information Architecture
- Copywriting / Content Strategy
- Concept Design / Creative Direction
- User Testing
Giles’ approach to user experience design and web strategy is simple: content drives everything. He believes that usability dogma, information architecture trends, visual design, technology platforms and functionality only ever exist to support the story you are trying to tell and the experience you are trying to create. Not to mention keeping it simple!
“I’ve worked with hundreds of users over the years, from kids to retirees to data-hungry ‘power-users’ and I’ve never had someone say, ‘that was too easy to use,’” Giles says.
“Even in these ‘user-generated times’ I still believe that content is the backbone to any experience. And the other rather obvious fundamental is audience. In my experience, if it doesn’t work for your audience, it doesn’t work. I’m a strong advocate of iterative, agile development and regular, face-to-face user testing to ensure that any project makes sense for your audience.”
Giles has worked for clients in nearly every sector with particular expertise in arts and culture; health and education; financial services; and, property and real estate. Better still, the projects he’s worked on have achieved or exceeded their ROI targets and won a slew of awards in Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand.
If you’re wondering what the web can do for your business or you’d just like to chat about what’s happening online in your sector, please contact Giles.
Giles Brown
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Ryan Day