Career
Ultraleap
Design Director
Feb 2020 - Present
Ultraleap are a tech scale-up that create hand-tracking and haptics tech for VR and gestural interfaces. As the first veteran design hire at the company, I’ve established and lead a user research and interaction design department. I’ve transformed ways of working across the company including introducing product teams, and through co’ordinated interaction research, established design standards and best practice for 3D UX/UI using gesture.
LinkedIn Learning & Springboard
Course Leader
Jun 2021 - Present
Following a surge in popularity with my YouTube series for aspiring designers, I’ve since created online video courses on sketching techniques and user story mapping for LinkedIn Learning and Springboard, which I continue to manage and engage with the student community. I’m currently working with LinkedIn Learning on a follow-up course, to be announced later this year.
Elsewhen
Service Design Lead
Oct 2019 - Jan 2020 (Contract)
With my experience in design transformation for financial and engineering companies, I was hired as design lead for digital strategy and transformation agency, Elsewhen. There I worked with a discovery team to redesign the entire customer service experience for a lending client, roadmapping the company’s transformation into a digitally-mature, more customer-centric lender and co-creating new ways of working with staff .
Wolters Kluwer
UX Design Lead
May 2019 - Sep 2019 (Contract)
Wolters Kluwer create well-established software for tax and accounting professionals, and needed their product suite overhauled, as well as a clear vision and roadmap for the next few years. Joining the relatively new UX team there, I built a solid understanding of customers through customer interviews and contextual enquiry. I trained staff in Design Thinking and Agile working methods, and delivered a new product vision and strategy in just six months.
Fathom
Interaction Design Lead
Nov 2018 - Feb 2019 (Contract)
As design lead for London digital agency Fathom, I worked with a small product and creative team on client-facing products such as dev-ops tools, crypto and currency trading platforms. These products were all complex, highly specialist and required both co-creation with users and bespoke data vis, UX and UI design to make ‘expert level’ subject matter easy to digest and efficient to work with.
Pancentric
Design Director
Jun 2017 - Oct 2018
London digital agency Pancentric help the fintech and insurance sectors with innovation and digital transformation. As Design Director there I led the design side of the business: growing a team, defining how design practice worked, bringing in and managing client relationships and managing design projects. As well as handling large-scale service design and B2B software projects, I ran regular Design Thinking workshops with client companies and helped found an internal innovation lab for a large client.
EE
UX Lead
Dec 2016 - Jun 2017
At EE, I was the most senior designer in a UX team responsible for EE’s main e-commerce and support site. Whilst overseeing site design for the iPhone X launch and an overhaul of EE’s broadband customer journey, I also introduced a raft of new ways of working - stand-ups, user story creation and mapping, responsive and interactive prototypes and regular usability testing.
DNV Renewables
UX Lead
Oct 2013 - Dec 2016
DNV create specialist applications for the renewable energy industry, used for designing wind turbines and solar PV plants., for example
I was DNV’s first ever UX hire, and in my three years there I transformed product strategy, design and development. I built a UX team, introduced user research and testing, UX/UI design and established a first design system. I worked closely with developer colleagues there to establish Lean UX /Agile best practice, and ran training courses to teach others how to test and research.
Kinneir Dufort
Senior Product Designer
Jun 2010 - Oct 2013
At product design and innovation agency Kinneir Dufort, I worked with clients including Sony, Coca-Cola, Unilever and AstraZeneca as the design lead on projects exploring opportunities for and creating breakthrough new product concepts. There I conducted user research including ethnographic studies in India and the US, ran innovation workshops with clients, created product designs and prototypes and refined and co-created them further with customers.
Cambridge Design Partnership
Product Designer
Nov 2007 - May 2010
Product innovation firm CDP specialise in commercialising new technologies and designing high-tech products. As part of a small industrial design team there, I worked closely with engineering colleagues to create new product concepts and deliver working prototypes to clients. I worked on the Dulux PaintPod range of powered paint rollers, one of the first smart energy meters, telemetry for racehorses, and a whole range of medical, pharmaceutical and scientific devices.
DesignEdge Cambridge
Product Designer
Jun 2006 - Aug 2007
At product design agency DesignEdge, I learned how to work for clients in an agency setting and how to quickly understand and re-imagine even very complex products. I also learned how to generate huge quantities of innovative ideas, even under the tightest of time pressures. I worked with senior designers on a wide range of technical devices from home security monitors to lab equipment to prosthetics.
The Lego Company
Toy Designer
Nov 2003 - Feb 2006
After graduating I moved to Denmark, where I worked as a toy designer at Lego’s headquarters in Billund. As a designer for Duplo, I created not just new Lego toy sets, but also oversaw the creation of new bricks in the Lego facrtory, as well as character and graphics design. I also worked for a year in Lego’s Concept Lab, researching trends in toy market and generating new concepts through storyboards and prototypes, to be considered for manufacture. Whilst there I also learn to speak Danish to an advanced level and used it in my everyday work.
Education
BA (Hons) Design for Industry
University of Northumbria
1999 - 2003
1st class honours degree in Product / Industrial Design, with a focus on sketching, prototyping, an evidence-led design process and a critical eye for craft and design quality. I also completed two four-month internships at manufacturer P&L Systems and design agency DesignEdge Cambridge.
Complex Application Design
Nielsen-Norman Group
Short course 2017
Short course focusing on best practice for the design of complex applications, for example those working across multiple devices, on large screens or featuring especially complex architectures and data representation.
Creative Leadership
Royal College of Art
Short course 2020
Short course for design leaders and managers, covering the role of a creative leader in organisations, principles, best practice and how to nurture creative culture. It also explored how best to manage creatives such as designers.
Data Visualisation
Guardian Masterclass
Short course 2021
Short course run by visual artist and data visualisation expert, Valentina D'Efilippo. The course covered types of data visualisation, effective storytelling through data, and creative process for identifying and creating appropriate visualisations.
User Experience Metrics
Interaction Design Association
Short course 2023
Short course focused on best use of metrics in user experience design. In particular, it covered the value of metrics in aiding communication within businesses, and in-depth exercises for defining, capturing and using different types of metrics in design projects.
UX Management & Strategy
Interaction Design Foundation
Short course 2023
Online course covering a broad range of topics related to design management and effective design strategy in business. Topics and exercises included the business case and ROI for UX design, metrics, Agile and Lean UX, and how to roadmap the evolution of a design team within a company.