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UIC Digital is an all-encompassing digital product agency bringing creative thinking and execution expertise to the challenges of design and engineering. We research, ideate and problem-solve for a huge variety of clients and our mission is to create engaging front end and easy-to-use back-end systems. The past 18 months have been incredibly exciting for the growth of the business and we’ve hurtled over several milestones, including tackling three big challenges and emerging triumphant.
I) We delivered on our biggest ever project –an enormous and radical global digital transformation of BBC.com that absorbed 50% of our workforce capacity for two years.
II) We took the big step of rebranding from UICentric to UIC Digital to better emphasise our ‘strength on the bench’ and range of services. We avoided any confusion in the marketplace with clear communications and we’ve seen a positive impact on the agency’s reputation.
III) We took on the largest volume of work in our existence – 160 projects in all, making a record revenue year to celebrate. Turnover exceeding £15m for 2023, up 32% on 2022 with over 37.5% increase in profit.
The BBC entrusted a hugely significant global project to UIC to ideate, design, develop and launch to an audience of more than 400 million in more than 200 countries with the aim of making BBC content more accessible globally.This was a defining project for UIC and demonstrated we can manage large-scale, high-profile and complex design and engineering briefs.
The work involved a wholesale research and discovery phase lasting many months before we even started on design and development. We led the creative vision for the project focused on transforming the website and developing a brand-new BBC app to bring content together from across the BBC for the first time.
The BBC is delighted with the project delivery so far (there’s more to come) and had this to say about working with our amazing UX Director Sam Drury.
“One of my favourite things about working with Sam is the questions he asks, and how these questions help spark others to do great work. As a true creative thinker, Sam doesn't start with solutions-mode. He lives inside curiosity-mode where he works to understand a problem from all angles, even sometimes finding the real problem inside the one that has been presented.”
Martina Fugazzotto, SVP Product Strategy & Creative, BBC
Overall, the course of the past year we have bucked the trend to ‘do more with less’ and made big investments. A crucial development has been the creation of UIC Labs - a hub for our collective of specialist UX designers and developers to experiment with new, innovative technologies to constantly evolve the strategic solutions we offer. The Labs’ output accelerates innovation and speed to market for our clients.
We also made major hires, including an Executive Director of Design and a Chief Growth Officer, and now have an overall team of more than 100 digital product experts based in London, New York and Budapest.
These investments have paid off in numerous ways.
We’ve broadened our client base as we take our learnings from our heartland of broadcast media and sport into new sectors, for example, we have projects underway in the Art and Gambling sectors.
We have created an ‘AI concierge’ that’s ground-breaking for the art sector and helps visitors navigate the sprawling international art fair Art Basel. We have also built an app at speed for betting platform Oddschecker to help the business break into the US market.
Our strengthened offering and quality of delivery means clients consistently return to UIC – we enjoy ongoing relationships with UEFA, Paramount and NBC.
UIC Digital has enjoyed a tremendous year thanks to great work, outstanding client service and our teams’ relentless curiosity to learn and improve. We’re looking forward to delivering even bigger and impressive best in class digital products and experiences in 2025.
Nomination Title: UIC Digital
