The MessageMaker (formerly PolyThink) platform was a customized, proprietary webservice developed by One To One Interactive's Labs division. The Labs division was responsible for innovating digital marketing solutions beyond traditional web development. These solutions included installed applications, mobile apps, desktop widgets and social spaces. The MessageMaker Platform was an integrated suite of products composed of a content management and publication system, an application deployment and sharing system, a CRM and e-mail delivery system, a social media curation and reputation management system, and an analytics and metric reporting system for apps, e-mail and social.

As part of the MessageMaker product development team, and as the Interactive Project Manager of the Labs division, it fell on me to work closely with our clients, as current and potential users of our platform, to optimize the user experience and integrate new product features needed for any content endpoint served from and reporting back to the platform. I would then translate the client's needs and business goals into actionable development items for the review of the product dev team and act as an agent for the user's interests - reconciling their needs with the development team's strategic goals for the product.

In addition to these responsibilities, it was also common to find myself constructing and customizing any given project's configuration, channel and content feed structure through the CMS platform.

An early claim to fame for OTO was the 'ScreenMate' - a windowless animated character that would move around and interact with the user's Windows desktop. These first proved very viral as e-greeting cards with customizable messages. Our first business model was to sell ad space in a 'splash screen' that displayed at the end of the animation. Our CMS, used to publish and distribute applications or other types of content receivers, was eventually merged with the larger 'MessageMaker' platform, which included features for e-mail marketing, CRM and social media management.

Our first true AIR ScreenMate was done for United Parcel Service. While the animated 3D character was very well done and served as a very clever notification method, the main draw of this application was the very close integration between our technology and the UPS worldwide delivery tracking API, allowing users to track the status of their shipped packages almost anywhere around the globe in real-time.

The ASPCA ScreenMate, another AIR production, took advantage of new CMS extensions - in addition to a customizable ScreenMate Communicator application for desktops, the project also incorporated native iPhone and Android applications, ready to consume the same content.

For Cottonelle, a set of built-in animated puppy 'tricks' were included on installation, but other tricks could be downloaded over time on a scheduled basis. Users were notified of newly available tricks though a popup alert, which became a regular feature in most of our applications.

A Desktop Communicator was a very broad term used to cover any number of runtime applications that did not feature a ScreenMate character. This allowed us to focus more on push content generated by the MessageMaker platform, such as document delivery as in the case of Oppenheimer's IRA@Hand Communicator.

The 'No Boundaries' Desktop Communicator we created for the Warner Brothers TV show pushed our technology further towards greater dependency on remotely retrieved multimedia assets.

Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's online marketing division reached out to us directly to propose an upgraded version of its first 'VIP CruisePass', using comments and suggestions harvested from users of the application through the surveys included in the original. We extended our backend MessageMaker publishing platform to include differentiated XML feeds based on specific sales territories, allowing Royal Caribbean to direct its messaging to a specific targeted group of agents or several groups simultaneously.

The MessageMaker platform allowed us to reach other growing audiences, such as those using popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Liberty Mutual Insurance worked with OTO to create a custom application that could be added to the Facebook business profile page of over 500 Liberty Mutual sales representatives.From MessageMaker, an administrato could monitor, edit and moderate the social messaging taking place in all 500 'social endpoints' including Wall postings, where customers were invited to engage directly with each rep.

When installed, the custom Welcome Page application would interface with Facebook's secured public API to retrieve each rep's profile and Wall info, save it in MessageMaker, then re-display it through a webpage served up by the MessageMaker CMS and appearing within an IFRAME construct built into the Welcome Page application. Other modules in the page layout would feature content published in MessageMaker to individual or groups of business reps.

For Ski Lake Tahoe, we built a similar endpoint to gather submissions for a popular sweepstakes.

The creation of personas was often necessary when planning the user experience design of any given project. Typical personas would be hypothesized after market-segmented survey data was gathered and analyzed, or recorded directly through user interviews. Complete demographic data and user scenarios, describing how any given set of users would interface with an existing system, would be taken into account when designing a solution. This science was applied both to the consumer facing applications and websites our clients would have us create for their audience (such as the Veramyst Allergy Watcher BDA shown here) as well as to our MessageMaker CMS and reporting system that our clients would employ to publish content and gather metric data.

Many other kinds of documentation were required for projects dealing with a great deal of customized features. The goal of Aegon/TransAmerica's LifeStage Advisor was to guide casual consumers to different insurance recommendations based on demographic data entered by the user, along with yes or no answers to several questions. Part of my job here was to test the widget logic for several campaigns constructed in XML using this script as a guide to arrive at the expected result, very time consuming and intricate work.

One To One Interactive ceased doing business in early 2012, but reincorporated shortly after as Geary LSF. One project that spanned that transitional period was a dramatic re-design of the Aspen SnowMass website. I had the pleasure of helping the development team lead the quality assurance effort preceding the client handoff and launch of this Sitecore managed project.