Girl Guides: Zone’ s UX design director Julie Dodd on harnessing digital to support social good

As The Drum continues to champion the digital leaders blazing a trail for young women to follow, Angela Haggerty catches up with Zone’s UX design director Julie Dodd, who was behind the original iPlayer and who now looks to harness the power of digital for the greater good.

In January this year, BBC iPlayer broke through the 300 million monthly users barrier and reported an average of 10.2 million daily requests. For Julie Dodd, UX design director at Zone, it’s pretty impressive to have on her CV that she was one of two people to design the original face of the iPlayer for its launch in 2007. Maybe surprisingly though, she doesn’t consider it her most favoured project.Rather, Dodd is these days applying her user design skills in a sector she feels more naturally drawn to – the third sector – and it’s a project for a major charity currently under wraps that Dodd is most excited about.“I’m particularly interested in how digital can support social good,” she says. “I find the commercial challenges very interesting in what we do, but really I think digital has enormous power to do good, and I’d like to be somebody who really champions that.“Being in an organisation like the BBC, which is publicly funded, I always felt a strong sense of responsibility to the people paying for the work we were doing. But my family are all a bunch of do-gooders, so I think it probably comes a lot from there too,” she laughs.Dodd has been at Zone for five and a half years, having begun her time at Public Zone before it merged with its sister agency in 2011. At the agency, she engages her interest in harnessing digital for social good, but prior to her time there she was involved in building the foundation of the BBC iPlayer, which transformed the broadcaster’s digital relationship with viewers. “In those days, most households had only one computer,” she reflects, explaining how the evolution of services such as iPlayer required ambitious foresight to drive them forward. “It didn’t live in a social space, it usually lived in a study and it didn’t really belong in the heart of the home in the way computers do now“We could already see it changing. We could see the early adopters who had laptops watching YouTube videos in the kitchen, so short-form video was already working, and if that was working it had to be possible to make long form video work. “It was a really interesting point in time in digital because we had a real sense that there was something in it. Initially, all of the audience feedback was telling us that there wasn’t,” she laughs. “I’m a great user advocate. I really believe in listening to people, but sometimes you have to really watch what they’re doing, not what they’re saying.” Dodd moved into the user design discipline after an initial interest in graphic design following her departure from university. She gained a degree in cross media design at Bournemouth, but is a great believer in design and digital disciplines such as coding as a craft, and is irked by an “insistence” in the industry that a degree is essential, pointing out that such restrictions have led to a lack of social diversity. “I have serious diversity concerns about social economic background,” she explains. “It really bugs me when I see job specs that say ‘must have a degree’. I think that’s completely inappropriate and it’s led to a real lack of social diversity in the digital world generally. Design is a craft profession. So is coding. It doesn’t require a degree.” While Dodd has real concerns over the lack of social diversity in the trade, she believes that changes in the gender imbalance are moving in the right direction, but in some sectors there is still a way to go. “I’m certainly conscious of the difference between genders but I think I’ve been quite lucky,” she says. “I personally have never found it to be a barrier, but I’ve always been surrounded by people who are very liberally minded. “That said, there have been times in my career, and I’m not particularly proud of it, but I have put on heels and lipstick in order to get things agreed when more traditional senior men were involved. I had one boss who was very like that – I’m not sure if he was aware he was like that – but when I needed things signed off I wore a shorter skirt. I’m not sure if that’s printable,” she laughs, “but it’s true. “Marketing seems to have really diversified,” she adds, “but technology wise it’s still massively male dominated. We joke about the fact we’ve got three or four female developers because that’s very unusual in a team of nearly 30.” Dodd says that the visual design sector has seen a better balance in gender over the last couple of years, and she sees a relatively 50/50 split in applications when recruiting. However, there are still notable differences higher up the ladder. “In terms of a senior level, certainly I found when I first became a creative director that I was in a bit of a minority – not a complete minority because the BBC has very fair standards of employment, but I wasn’t surrounded by that many women in the discipline,” she says. “It’s quite a new discipline overall, but it was certainly male weighted.” She adds, however, that it has “changed a bit” since she left the BBC after nine years at the broadcaster and during her stint at Zone. For Dodd, she has proven her credentials in her chosen field and is firmly settled in an area of her industry that combines her personal ambition of using digital to make a bigger difference.This article was first published in the 19 March issue of The Drum.