Feature UX
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FATHOM CEO GARETH DUNLOP EXPLAINS HOW USER-CENTRED DESIGN CAN CREATE EXPERIENCES TO HELP BRANDS IMPROVE EFFICIENCY AND INCREASE SALES. COLIN WHITE REPORTS.
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n the late noughties, a collective term for design performance started to become mainstream – the term was ‘UX’, a collection of design performance-related skills and disciplines. Today, at a time when consumers embrace or abandon a brand depending on the quality of the digital experience, the importance of an effective user experience, or UX, strategy has never been more critical. Fathom founder and CEO Gareth Dunlop has always cut his cloth within the digital sphere. “I graduated in the mid-1990s just as the web was in its infancy,” he says. “I experienced the highs and lows of the dot com boom and bust while running Northern Ireland’s largest web agency at the time, Tibus, from 2002 to 2009.” Following the sale of Tibus, Dunlop began to examine why some organisations enjoyed great success online, while others struggled to get off the ground. These examinations resulted in the digital entrepreneur developing a real interest in design performance, and time and time again he came back to one simple truth: organisations that knew its customers best, valued customer insights and understood customer motivations, achieved the best results. In September 2011, Dunlop plucked up to the courage to set up Fathom, a dedicated UX agency based in Belfast. Almost eight years later, a team of 12 manage the UX needs of some of the most recognisable, as well as emerging, brands across Ireland and the UK. The county Antrim native has also been involved with a host of other digital startups – some of which have been successful, others less so. “If you look at my LinkedIn profile, my career has moved from glorious success to glorious success, but that’s just because I haven’t posted the crushing failures,” the ambitious business leader confesses. Awareness around UX is undoubtedly growing. The world’s leading digital brands, without exception, fully understand how important it is to put the user at the centre of all design processes. “There is a realisation that user expectation is increasingly being set not by competitors in a specific sector, but by WhatsApp, Google
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