Felipe Memoria

Hello. I'm a partner at Huge, where I head the User Experience discipline across seven offices worldwide and oversee our office in Brazil. I also serve as an advisor for Bondsy. I live on American Airlines. I'm a designer.

Get in touch

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Long bio: I started my career in Brazil where I led design in a team at Globo.com - the largest media company in Latin America. We created some interesting things, including the most popular sports site in the country.

While at Globo, I wrote a book about User Experience that ended up becoming very popular with the local design community. It sells pretty well to this day, even though it was written in 2005. The publishers constantly ask me to write another version, but unfortunately I can't do it anymore. It was the most painful experience of my career and I have much more responsibilities now than I used to - I was only 26 when I did it.

I moved to the United States to work at Huge as an Interaction Designer in 2007. I worked my way up and in 3 years I was made a Partner within the company. I’ve worked on the best projects of my career at Huge, including CNN.com, HBO GO and the Pepsi Refresh Project.

At the end of 2010 we won an international competition for Itaú, the largest bank in the southern hemisphere, and opened the office in my hometown of Rio de Janeiro, hiring the best of the people I'd worked with previously in Brazil.

I also helped Huge expanding to Brasília and Portland and regularly visit the offices in the west coast and Europe.

I have a MS in Usability and Human-Computer Interaction and a BS in Visual Design, both from PUC-Rio, where I also taught for two years before moving to the US.

I'm a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

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Personal: I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro. The Memoria family has a tradition in architecture. My great-grandfather, Archimedes Memoria, was the first of them. Everyone else followed in his path. Turns out my mom is an architect too - a great one, though her side of the family is composed mostly of engineers and artists. So I grew up surrounded by great furniture and books.

One day I saw an announcement that Fluminense's games were going to be broadcast internationally and realized it would suddenly be feasible to live abroad. That was in 2006. Nobody in NYC knows what Fluminense is, but I'm possibly the most die hard fan living in the city. I deeply care about them - in the most unhealthy way possible.

Today I live in the same DUMBO apartment in Water Street where Huge was born with my wife and child.

Family, work and soccer play a large role in my life. Other things I like to do include building bikes and playing Call of Duty with no guns - knife only. My greatest idol is the brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna.

As a designer, I believe in impossibly hard work done by high performance individuals. I think we should design for people and make things that are elegant then get out of the way for the content to shine.

For more about me ask around.

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Personal projects

• Flu FC project — Tricolor de Coração
• Flu FC Twitter — @flu
• Bike projects — First, Second

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Elsewhere

• Email — felipe@fmemoria.com.br
• Twitter — @fmemoria
• LinkedIn — in/fmemoria
• Instagram — @fmemoria
• Phone — +1 718 755 7439

HBO GO is probably the most beloved product I've ever worked on. And it's likely to be the most successful product ever launched by Huge.

Our first project was the iPad app - the tablet version of their streaming service. In parallel, we designed the iPhone and Android versions, and later a prototype for HBO GO on smart TVs.

This prototype was Huge's first TV UI project, and served as a design reference for the other platforms we designed after: Roku, Xbox, Kindle, Playstation and others. Because we were designing for multiple devices, we came up with the idea of continuity - users could start watching in one device and finish in another one.

The main goal from a design stand point was to get out of the way. HBO has the best series in the world. Our design needed to be transparent so people could find and watch the shows they wanted as fast as possible. Although the UI turned out to be very simple we played around endlessly with a new pattern for the homepage: the mosaic. Basically, we just took the traditional desktop homepage carousel and exploded it. But it was a pattern that hadn’t been seen before, and I personally liked it because it explored the unique nature of the tablet, allowing users to swipe to any direction and pinch.

This product changed HBO as a business. The company now is recognized as one of the most innovative in the world and is fast becoming a content & technology company.

• — Download the app
• — And interesting reaction

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HBO GO Awards

• — Time's Top 10 Apps, 2011
• — Apple's Best iPad App's, 2011
• — TechCrunch's Top 20 Apps, 2011
• — Mashable's Top 10 iOS Apps, 2011
• — Pixel Awards
• — IxDA Interaction Awards
• — CommArts Interactive Annual, 2012
• — One Show Interactive, Bronze
• — Mobi Awards, Best in Show
• — Mobi Awards, Best Branded Content

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For 23 years, Pepsi invested millions of dollars on a 30 second Super Bowl spot. In 2010 and 2011, the company decided to use that money for a different purpose - it would give it away to people with ideas to make the world a better place. It was like a Kickstarter funded by Pepsi, where the most popular ideas win.

The Pepsi Refresh Project was not only a voting platform, but arguably the most successful social media campaign of all time, one that challenged traditional ideas of marketing by becoming a campaign that sustained itself for over 2 years.

With an overwhelming response from users, who caused the one thousand idea slots to be filled in less than a second, Pepsi Refresh had and outstanding return in PR: a billion media impressions just in the first three months, and a dramatic improvement in Pepsi’s brand rating.

We made voting as easy and accessible as possible. People could vote from the site, from Facebook, texting, and from their mobile devices - using the app or simply opening the optimized site on Safari.

We also worked on a special version of Pepsi Refresh to help with the Gulf Oil-spill Disaster.

We collaborated with Pepsi to define the strategy then we designed and built the entire platform. From a brand perspective, we also collaborated with TBWA\CHIAT\DAY LA, who worked with Pepsi on the campaign.

• — Pepsi Refresh on the NYT
• — Wikipedia page
• — A Case for Marketing Textbooks
• — 'How it works' video
• — 2010 Commercial
• — Year 2 video
• — Video case study

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PRP Awards

• — Cannes Cyber Lion, Bronze
• — OMMA, Best in Show
• — OMMA, Best Integrated Campaign
• — Art Director’s Club, Merit
• — CLIO, Silver
• — One Show Interactive, Merit (2)
• — Interaction Awards, Best in Category

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We were lucky enough to be chosen by CNN to redesign their site. For me, it was an honor and a career defining project - it's the greatest news site in the world. And millions of people use the site every day.

We had a lot of fun and worked very closely with CNN's senior leadership. We created all the most important templates you still see today on CNN, most notably the article page and the video player. We also introduced the iconic red bar with the logo centralized, killing the ".com". So it's not CNN.com. It's CNN.

With the redesign, CNN wanted us to find a way to better leverage their video content. The way we integrated video turned out to be one of our biggest successes on the project.

Another interesting fact is that the homepage CNN launched, with very minor changes, was the same one we designed and submitted during the pitch process. Our design was live for two presidential elections.

• — Watch the CNN.com video

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CNN Recognition

• — Official honoree, Webby Awards.

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Itaú is the largest bank in the southern hemisphere and, needless to say, a really big deal in Brazil. It was our founding client for the office, and we couldn't have asked for a better opportunity and partnership.

I was personally excited not only as a n Itaú client for more than 10 years, but for the impact that we could cause in people's lives. If we did this right, we could actually help 20% of Brazil's population organize their finances better and have more prosperous lives.

The bold and unique new design for the homepage, navigation and internal templates launched in 2012 with overwhelming positive feedback from customers and on social networks. It is already changing the space and bringing the digital design landscape in Brazil to a whole new level.

• — Visit itau.com.br

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MY BOOK: Design para a Internet: Projetando a Experiência Perfeita (Design for the Internet: Designing the Perfect Experience) — published by Elsevier in 2005.

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Design for the Internet is basically about UX and was published in Portuguese only. It's likely that it was the first book in the world to talk about Web 2.0. Remember that term? It ended up becoming very popular and it somehow influenced a generation of designers in Brazil. Considering that one of my goals in life is to push the industry forward and train other designers, this is the closest I got in my career to achieving it - at least so far. It's the best thing I've ever made. I wrote it in one month almost without sleeping.

I also published some academic white papers - that I'm not quite as proud of - while I was getting my Masters in Usability and HCI - and contributed several times to newspapers and magazines in Brazil. Since almost everything is in portuguese and I have no intention in translating it, most of this column is in my native language.

Sobre o livro: Se alguém perguntar "Felipe, sobre o que é o seu livro?", a resposta será: sobre pontos importantes que devemos pensar ao projetar produtos digitais. O livro fala sobre processo de projeto, design de interfaces, testes de usabilidade e questões que vão além do desenho do produto. São aquelas capazes de proporcionar uma experiência agradável, hipnotizante. A idéia é mostrar que não basta projetar um site bonito e funcional para criar um produto de sucesso. Isso não é suficiente. A experiência que ele proporciona é decisiva. E, para que isso aconteça, é preciso explorar a característica que mais diferencia a internet das outras mídias: a enorme quantidade de pessoas conectadas.

• — Site do livro com mais info
• — Design para a Internet no SlideShare
• — Compre já  (R$45 - R$79)
• — Outros livros recomendados

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Talks

I try to focus most of my time making things. But sometimes I do give talks - once or twice a year. I enjoy when the conferences are in places I've never been before. Send me an email if you want me to speak at your event. Past experience:

• WOB, Wide Open Business, Rio de Janeiro
• NYC UXPA, Brooklyn
• 3° EBAI, São Paulo
• World Usability Day, Rio de Janeiro
• II Encart, Londrina
• 11° Encontro de Web Design, Rio de Janeiro
• III Fórum de Design, Manaus
• iMasters InterCon, São Paulo
• ECCE-12, York
• 3° USIHC, Rio de Janeiro
• 2° USIHC, Rio de Janeiro

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INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

• TheFWA
• Dinheiro Não é Tudo
• Um Traço Brasileiro no Design da Web
• The New Rules for Designing for the iPad
• Desconstruindo Interfaces
• Planeje o Site Perfeito
• Bola da Vez 2
• Bola da Vez 1
• Capes.gov.br
• Sinfonia das Cores
• O que é que esse site tem?
• Ícones: quando usar
• Você já tem seu ciberfolio?
• Usabilidade made in Brazil
• Sobe ou desce?
• Você confia em segurança na internet?
• Redação iMasters

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Masters Dissertation

I sometimes like to say I'm the world's greatest specialist in Breadcrumbs. That was the theme of my thesis. Do they work or not? The answer: only if people are really lost. But if people find their way via other methods, breadcrumbs are completely useless. The thesis is in Portuguese only.

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