Global UX leadership of the first worldwide mobile content portal — from the original launch to the camera phone.
Context
In 2002, mobile telephony was primarily voice and SMS. The idea of treating a phone as a curated gateway to multimedia content — music, games, news, picture messaging — was new and untested. Vodafone live! was the attempt to turn this idea into a global mass-market product, technically carried by the mobile data generation of the time: WAP / GPRS / Edge. Already involved in the original launch in 2001/2002 as a consultant for Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) — Vodafone was the final client before the move into the group. From October 2003, global UX leadership of the service inside the Vodafone Group.
Contribution
Leadership of the user experience function for the Live! portal: design, information architecture, innovation, and the underlying user research. Build-up of cross-functional teams of designers, engineers, and content experts. Negotiation and conceptual integration of content with music labels, game developers, and news publishers.
In that mobile generation, UX also covered the deeper technical layers: optimising page-load speed and time-to-first-content on the WAP / GPRS / Edge networks of the day — concerns that look trivial now but required substantial negotiation and engineering at the time. Close collaboration with the handset manufacturers in Japan to shape devices around these performance requirements.
Co-shaping of the early Live! hardware generation, in particular the Sharp GX10 — the first mobile phone in Europe with an integrated camera and colour display, sourced via Vodafone’s J-Phone acquisition in Japan, awarded “Best Mobile Phone” at the GSMA Awards 2003. The thesis at the time — that eventually every phone would be used to take photos — was largely met with scepticism in the market.
Vodafone live! became the blueprint for what was later called the “mobile internet” and expanded into numerous Vodafone markets. With the rise of the iPhone and Android from 2007 onwards, the operator portal business model eroded — the conceptual response to this was the parallel project Vodafone 360.