Andy Thelwell — Interaction Designer

I led a multi-skilled team designing and developing this 3D visualisation and seating management tool for the UEFA Euro2008 football tournament.

Working For:	RE:MEDIA
Clients:	TicketMaster Systems (Synchro), UEFA
Year:	2006 - 2008
My Responsibilites:	Full Life-Cycle Project Management; Team Lead; UX Design; Development
Technologies:	Shockwave 3D, ASP.NET/C#, SQL, XML, Ajax, XHTML

In late 2006, UEFA and their ticketing provider TicketMaster commissioned an online visualisation and seating management tool for the Euro 2008 tournament. I acted as Project Manager and lead designer, leading a multi-skilled team through the definition, design and delivery of the project.

The heart of the project — the 3D stadium visualisation — was based on the protoype VEVA™ techonology. Beyond that, however, the project required a huge amount of design and development, with significant portions of the tool being completely bespoke to suite UEFA's needs. I was responsible for defining the scope of the project, working closely with the team from TicketMaster Systems.

Once the project entered the design and development phase, I worked cross-functionally — defining the overall user experience, data structures and information architecture. I created wireframes and prototypes of the management functionality and wrote a lengthy functional specification as required by the client. I worked closely with the visual design team to define a fully customised, UEFA-branded user interfacefor the tool.

Beyond the project definition and user experience design, I was also heavily involved in the front-end development of the project. I built large parts of the finished tool and also personally designed and developed several middleware utilities for creating dynamic 3D seating plans, combining data from the client's ticketing database with diagrams from each of the 8 venues.

This was an exceptionally demanding, exciting and complex piece of work, and one in which I am proud to say I played a very major role. It was a first-class experience and an unforgettable roller-coaster ride lasting around 15 months. The project was delivered in early 2008.