Opinion

24 Hours with… Dwayne Serjeant, Isobar’s APAC UX design chief

Dwayne Serjeant24 Hours With… spotlights the working day of some of the most interesting people in Mumbrella Asia’s world. Today, we hear about a day in the life of Isobar’s Hong Kong-based APAC experience design lead, Dwayne Serjeant.

7:00am – Rise ’n’ shine. Between the morning regime, and stuffing my face with Bovril on toast, my mobile is loading up Flipboard, Facebook, Slack, Skype and Outlook – usually in that order. The cab ride to work lets me check off a few things before arriving at the office.

9:30am – Jump into a team review on one of our global hospitality brands. The team is focused on conversion optimisation and we review the scenarios, journey maps, paper prototypes and get a quick group-sketch session going on a particularly thorny problem. Collaboration is the name of the game here! I make a note to grab time with our media teams at Vizeum and Carat to talk about campaign and comms needs.

11:00am – Finally received an RFP from a prospective client we’ve been talking to for a while. I sit down with the Biz Lead, ECD, Strat Director and a few others to carve out next steps. We decide on workshopping over a formal response as a first step – it builds better bonds and gives us more focus & detail, if we can isolate some of the ‘open’ parts of the RFP. Let’s see what they think!

Noon – Hop onto our bi-weekly Regional Team call with guys and gals from Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and China. Opportunities, resourcing and business planning top the bill. We decide to parachute a few specialists out of Oz into a couple of the markets, and build a crack team for one really exciting opportunity – “Just make it happen!” is the mandate, and so we do.

1:00pm – Lunch at my desk, which I actually don’t mind – gives me a chance to catch up on some less pressing things…like a quarterly review from our global innovation team. Sensors, IoT, specialist mobile and healthcare opportunities are all over the place, and the review covers not just what we’re doing or what we have the opportunity to do, but just how far ahead those guys are thinking. Think I’ll borrow some of this for a client meeting next week.

2:00pm – Learning is key for any constantly growing organization. I sit down with our Experience Design Director in HK to plan out the next content drop for our online Isobar Academy. Lots of really great stuff over the next few months, but we need to put some good structure around it. We discuss everything from prototyping to behavioural modelling to conception/ideation and also review the feedback from the previous month. Our London-based Global Talent and Development Director will be on the phone with us tomorrow to review it all.

3:00pm – I squeeze in a quick Slack session with our team in India. They have a great client opportunity which requires some industry vertical experience – which we just happen to have in Hong Kong. We work out a high-level plan for a 5-day secondment from Hong Kong to India which I’ll flesh out tonight. Wish I was going – India’s beautiful!

4:30pm – Planning for 2017 is in full swing and I get on a conference call with our CEO who’s in London at the moment. We review some high-level planning, areas of focus, regional trips and then divide-and-conquer for the next check-in. 2017 is going to be a monster year which is really exciting.

5:00pm – A surprise visit from one of our Dentsu colleagues, who heads one of the innovation teams in Tokyo. We get a quick townhall meeting set up and sit back for the show – it’s a real mix of fleshed-out, fully working ideas and fragments of ‘things’ (walking wallets, anyone?). There’s a lot of conversation around leveraging ideas for a couple of key regional clients based out of Hong Kong – and that’s what he’s here to do, spread the love.

6:00pm – Townhall done, we settle back into an end-of-day regular – scotch in the corner. Our Japanese colleague knows this and has come prepared. The whiskey flows and the noise grows but it’s a great way to wind down a day.

7:00pm – Nicely buzzing, I head home for dinner with the family. Kids are glued to their devices, as usual, but I drag them out for a quick walk with the dogs before dinner. Devices be damned!

9:00pm – I settle in for a little catchup work on 2017 planning and flesh out the India plan over Mural – quick sprints, quick activities to provide guidance and insight and then a structured format for constant review. Good to go!

10:00pm – Guilty pleasures – I crack open a last double-shot of whiskey, my PS4 and play Destiny for a few hours. Nothing like killing people online to wind down the day. Fireteam anyone?

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