Norman Yuson Cuaño

TouchVision was aimed at a demographic of “Millennials Plus” (18-35), who grew up using digital technology and social media. It was “going to be TV for tablets,” where app fans can watch couch potato style or create a playlist based on likes.

Our iRgonomic startup team in New York worked on the Chicago startup's dedicated About portal for advertisers. I strived to simplify the interface and make its dramatically innovative value propositions easily approachable and visually arresting.

For landmark, groundbreaking events, I presented TouchVision as the go-to channel for up close and personal coverage so that on-site attendees can tune-in, bear witness, and totally immerse themselves in the spectacular experience.

Teddy was the editor-in-chief of our university publication and I was its managing editor, his hardest worker. We joined the desktop publishing revolution in 1988 and for a good four years, our editorial board optimized the fortnightly process of print design and production so that our fellow writers and student leaders could focus and stay on message for social change.

When he ran for senate after three terms in Philippine congress, naturally I volunteered to help Teddy design his website and manage its open source development. But really, my most meaningful contribution concentrated on branding and positioning his public personality as 100% authentic. Whether or not he actually wins, Teddy will forever stay true to his core as a die-hard social activist.

As a marketing creative, I love to help brands find their voice and visually tell their story, so they can make and accumulate the wealth of meaningful connections needed to build trust, authenticity, and passion at every step of their customers journey.

Digital Media Training helps organizations win more sales by gaining knowledge and confidence so they can basically fine-tune their abilities and ultimately exceed their budgets. To help DMT optimize the user experience of its online training platform, I interviewed stakeholders, gathered and analyzed data, features and requirements for managing educational assets, student assessments, training tracks, progress reports, user groups, and email communications.

I sketched, prototyped, and worked with our enterprise architect and technical development team to create and deliver an agile plan of action, map user stories and solve user problems, discover and design workflows and style guides, then test and iterate for improvements. It was my first humbling experience in user experience design from end to end, and gratefully, moving forward, I now continuously apply anything I painfully learned for future projects.

As a UX practitioner I'm passionate about discovering and solving user problems through continuous learning and persistent hard work, honest conversation for loud and clear feedback, data analytics and emotional intelligence so that truth guides and governs, user stories drive designs for products that fulfill their purpose, solutions exceed stakeholder expectations and people love their experience from end to end.

Not everything in brand marketing and UX design is actually creative. Sometimes it’s pure production work subcontracted from multinational advertising agencies with unlimited budgets. But that’s no reason to underdeliver. I thrive in seizing any opportunity to learn fresh new skills or appreciate good old basic techniques.

Great work is what I’m all about, especially when it meets requirements and, goals and objectives. And in these two projects for big pharma, I’m also proud to share the origins of my knowhow in building responsive websites with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Drupal is a ”free, open-source web content management platform for content, community, and commerce,” while Pantheon is the “high-performance hosting platform where marketers and developers build, host, and manage their most important websites.” For this UNICEF project of McCann New York, I seized the opportunity to learn the basics of Drupal on Pantheon.

A module is “a set of PHP, JavaScript, and/or CSS files that extends site features and adds functionality.” Chaos Tool Suite and Views are the top two most popular Drupal 7 modules I was happy to learn for designing and building granular search features for finding “free and adaptable resources” by activity and target audience, according to regions and countries where they are most needed to save children’s lives.

Building on the basics of Drupal on Pantheon, like a boss I was able to develop a full-blown restaurant website complete with interactive menus, food and wine galleries, special event blogs and coupons, and real-time online reservations. While it only took me two weeks to build and one week to improve, I got to manage and update its content for six months and train my freelance client on website content management along the way.

Blackfish just came out and obliterated the Sea World brand as a first world amusement park, so I positioned our pitch to refresh CMA’s website by focusing on the non-profit’s grassroots community mission to rescue, rehabilitate and release sick and injured marine animals while advancing research and educating the public.

Responsive website design, front-end code production, Drupal content management, Jira issue resolution, and Pantheon automated deployment with continuous user needs discovery, agile project management and documentation, data analyses and stakeholder reporting, customer education and training — and the hits just kept on coming! Lesson learned? Build and nurture a team that cares with a passion.

My first (and perhaps only) registered brand tagline got birthed from rigorous buyer persona and competitor research, iterative analysis of the company’s core values versus its actual SWOT — discovered firsthand with its founders, and for two straight weeks, on-site and on-camera interviews of its rockstar development talent and project management team.

Armed with a brand new recipe for Salsita's secret awesome sauce, I designed marketing automation workflows then aligned sales pitch decks and service playbooks to engage not only search-driven leads seeking low cost outsource developers for web and mobile apps, but more so client-recommended prospects searching for long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships with a team-driven brand for engineering exceptional experiences and exceeding customer expectations from end to end.

The Founder CEO's all-hands presentation of high-level vision and strategy for Salsita's branding and positioning refresh was met with a lukewarm, cautiously optimistic reception, so I stepped up, tossed out my prepared speech, and rallied the troops around the responsibility and accountability that every team player must now individually own up to. All we basically did was put three words together to spell out and pave the pathway moving forward, but the professional sense of urgency and personal passion needed to deliver as promised can only be owned through great work. They just have to Bring.It.On — and that, in the end, I was told with a firm handshake, was how we successfully launched.

As proof of concept that Salsita is made of 100% hot stuff, I produced video demos of the team's most complex and sophisticated web and mobile applications, in addition to directing short brand marketing videos that showcase volunteer client testimonials.

“As a consultant, Norman lead a strategic repositioning and rebranding effort at Salsita. He tackled the challenge of collecting and organizing diverse (and competing) ideas into a framework that helped us zero in on what was important... ultimately helped us "find our voice". As an experienced marketing professional, he understands how branding, marketing and sales fit together to drive long term business strategy. I recommend him without reservation for companies hoping to refine their brand messaging and market positioning.”

Brad Byrd, COO
Salsita Software
Prague, Czechia