So as we near end of summer – WOW-elite looks forward to an exciting new phase of on-going project builds for current clients and new exciting and challenging project scoping for new clients.

We are continually impressed by the technical skills of our #WOWELITEcrew as they come together at our crew meetings to crunch out smart-thinking, innovative solutions. However – recently I have been even more impressed by their ability and professional approach to client engagement and interaction. These are not necessarily skills taught within the University lecture room – there is still not enough focus on these ‘real-life’ skills in HE. But by engaging our crews right from the start with the client and in the project scoping / evaluation – very quickly the crews gain client trust, invest their innovation, creativity and desire for best output into the project – and you start to see a confidence build – an inquisitive and challenging manner that seeks only to extract from the client what the client ‘REALLY’ wants – and as our crews build on this we start to see a momentum that both excites us as mentors but you can also see – takes the crew members up another whole set of levels in how to work in the real world with real clients on real budgets against real deadlines.

Recently on a project, one of our UX crews (thanks again UCL!) delivered a quite beautiful set of Axure wireframes to our dev crew to get down and dirty with (in a strictly coding fashion we may add!). But to get to that point it was compelling to see how they slowly started to challenge, enquire, test, push for validation of concepts etc with the client – and after client meetings they would huddle round and brainstorm / innovate / test etc until they came through with all layouts / templates / prove of concept validation with regards to the core user journey and a downright impressive set of wireframes and HTML walkthrough – all against a quite complex brief and occasional client shift on requirements.

Impressed most by their integrity, commitment to engaging the very best in UX tools and techniques – not being scared to challenge the client and to only include a user function if clearly validated –  James Laurie, Misha Patel and Dammy Busari (all MSc HCI – UCL class of 2014) have clearly proven they are the ‘real deal’ and it has been more than a pleasure working with them on current projects and we hope they will be very much involved in new and exciting projects in the pipeline.

If any potential employers would like WOW-elite references for any of our crew members – please contact Alan at: info@wow-elite.com

Alan Stuart