User Experience made better

Does your company have a presence on the social web, but no User Experience (UX) specialist? If so, I can help you. Watch this two minute Blog Friends case study slideshow to see my UX work in action in a service that grew from zero to 27k users—including 13 of the world's Top 100 bloggers—in eight months.

What I offer

I can help you make your service's user-facing experience simpler, more powerful and more intuitive. I can take some or all of these steps with your company:

• Clarifying your User Experience (UX) question or challenge
• UX testing and evaluation*
• UI concept development or iteration
• UI design implementation
• Full or modular solution development (in partnership with web solutions agency Brain Bakery) 

*Optionally, I can engage my network of leading UK social media influencers for your UX testing, creating great PR opportunities and insights into that key demographic's needs for you.

Your ROI

On the hyper-competitive web, every useability barrier is a costly lost opportunity. I can help you to get to the heart of your usability issues quickly and efficiently, and then help you to solve them too.

• Clear objectives and engagement structure help you to project ROI
• Modular approach helps you tailor projects to your exact requirements
• Potential top-line benefits of even modest improvements in usability can be very significant

My track record

As CEO and UX/UI design lead for i-together Ltd., I am responsible for the Blog Friends and Buzzspotr user experiences.


Blog Friends was a social blog reading app on facebook that had 27k users, amongst them 13 of the Technorati 100.

• "My favourite Facebook app is Blog Friends... It's delightfully simple but packs in a lot of features."—Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk
• "I have been a big fan of the service since it launched, it has brought efficiency, variety and serendipity to my feedreading to the extent that I have pretty much stopped using any other reader."—Nic Brisbourne, DFJ Esprit
• "The most useful (eventually the only) Facebook App I used."—Alan Patrick, Broadsight
• And Robert Scoble, the world's leading technology blogger, put us in his Facebook Application Top 10.

Take a look at this two minute slideshow to find out just what it is about Blog Friends that people loved.


Buzzspotr is a social location-sharing service, currently in closed alpha. Buzzspotr makes it easy and fun to find friendly places and faces in the city.

• "Buzzspotr is reminiscent of Dodgeball (acquired by Google and mothballed) and Plazes, but, since it currently uses Twitter and Google maps, it is really a web app, not a mobile service or a PC download, which suggests it could scale faster."—Mike Butcher, Techcrunch
• "A neat way to communicate with your network and see where people are gathering and who’s talking about what... a truly useful mobile app, one that I reckon has great potential."—Neville Hobson
• "The team that built both [Blog Friends and Buzzspotr] is widely known in London as being amongst the best in their field... Angel or seed-fund specialists would do well to get in touch."—Mike Butcher, Techcrunch

Buzzspotr demonstrations can be arranged on request (we are in closed alpha at the moment).

Communication is key to success

Of course, I didn't make these great user experiences alone—I worked with both i-together's team of three and our community as a whole to learn about what was needed and wanted. Good communication has been key to our success. 

Similarly, I will work closely with you and your team, and also with your users and target users as appropriate, to ensure that every step we take together is along the path of your strategy to serve your users actual needs.

And the more you open your UX development process to your community and the world, the more effectively I can communicate the excitement of your project to my excellent personal network of influencial social media figures. If they take an interest in what you are doing, you may find you get the kind of authentic and compelling PR that money can't buy—for free!

Tech savvy

At the same time, working closely with i-together's development team, coupled with my prior study and consultancy in the digital identity space (see this blog's archives), enable me to root my UI work in a clear understanding of diverse technologies and their constraints, including:  database management, scalability factors, bandwidth and server performance issues, SEO best practices, HTML, Flash, CSS, JavaScript (and Facebook-specific versions of HTML and JavaScript), Facebook Platform, REST APIs, OpenID, Microformats and RSS. 

In short, my UX and UI work is rooted deeply in an awareness of both what is compellingly useful and what is technically possible—and the broad scope of technical challenge entailed by any given design decision. 

Interested? Let's talk

If you have a challenge or question you think I could help you to solve, please let me know and I will see what I can do. It's never too soon to make your users' experience better!

Email: luke@weaverluke.com
Twitter and Skype: weaverluke
Mobile: 07985 119095