UX/UI Designer
2018
This was a global redesign of one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world - consolidating hundreds of different web platforms from different markets into one cohesive system, and unifying the brand on digital.
I was brought in as a reinforcement during the execution phase of the wireframes + UI designs, after much of the broader strategic work had been done.
In a fast moving ship with a zillion parts, I was working daily with strategy, project mgrs, heads of UX and lead creatives to design (UI) and annotate (functional) assigned areas of the site such as the Accessories Shop, Fleet (business sales), and the Finance Calculator.
It was during the design of the Accessories where I achieved a small win - pushing back on previously agreed deliverables to offer a more robust sales experience when purchasing car accessories.
There were plenty of complexities with regards to the interaction design of the Finance Calculator, too. From selecting your vehicle and model, using sliders to offer a playful interaction to input length of loan, deposit amount, and milage, and using progressive disclosure for further bespoke questions regarding trade-ins…. there was plenty for me to be getting stuck into.. on mobile and web.
We had a design system in place with many of the UI components already set, which was useful. I simply followed along to these guidelines…
Deliverables included .sketch files for UI designs and functionally annotated pdfs.
Founder & Product (UX/UI)
2015-2018
Pillow has supported over 10,000 couples since its early conception, 4 years ago, as the Pillow Talk mailing list, Blindfold audio follow-alongs and finally the Pillow iOS App. It's been a journey!
I raised 3 rounds of pre-seed capital and worked with couples’ experts all over the world to create the audio content (similar to Headspace/Calm, but for connection/intimacy education.)
We participated in Startup Chile and I led a small remote team. We’ve had 45k downloads of the app, and unfortunately are winding down Q4 2018 because we couldn’t get product-market fit.
As a digital product founder, you play a part in all aspects of business and product execution - from design to content and from strategy to monetisation. It’s helped me become a well rounded product designer.
I have experience at many levels of web/mobile product creation; front end development, user testing, wireframes, UI design and deployment… and can seamlessly move from from high level strategy to executing design.
Hear more about Pillow on our (failed) crowdfunding WeFunder attempt.
Check out the app on iOS & website.
Or take a look at another one of my projects, below.
Product Management & Design (incl. UX & Proj Mgmt.)
2013
As the Product Lead and a team of 10 we delivered 2 successful app launches with 100K+ downloads with 40%+ 7 day retention, alongside improvements to the website.
At Memrise, Balsamiq mock-ups was an essential low fidelity design tool to communicate ideas to our sole visual designer, and the developers! You’ll notice they aren’t fully formed and well articulated wireframes. This was due to the pace at which we were moving. Many design discussions were had face to face with the UI designer and our small team of developers.
Memrise were still in their infancy when I was working there, with many side projects being explored to prove market fit. I spent time on 2 such projects, 1) Cat Academy, where you learned Spanish through photos of cats and 2) A Video Dictionary Concept.
Today, Memrise has over 20 million members worldwide, making learning joyful! It was a wonderful role working alongside Ed Cooke the founder and CEO - a grand master of memory!
Senior UX Designer (IA, UX, Wireframes, Prototyping)
2011
As one of two UX designers, we redesigned Sky.com/shop with the sole goal of increasing online conversation for one of UK’s most visited websites.
Within 3 months of deployment, it achieved a 20% uplift in NPS and 35+% rise in task completion resulting in net benefits of $MM.
The 3-month contract included fortnightly usability testing and a very comprehensive interactive Axure prototype.
UX Designer (User Testing, User Journeys, Wireframes)
2012
I was part of a small design team focusing on the the User/Play Experience at MoshiMonsters.com. At my time working there, we had 80M+ registered users worldwide. Quantitive analysis was just as important as qualitative in this position!
Notable projects incl. setting up and running regular play testing sessions with kids and redesigning the signup flow, increasing task completion by 30%.
Unfortunately, I never captured the redesigns of the onboarding but you can get a rough feel to the heuristic evaluation we started with with stickies on the wall, capturing all the touch points for the kids first experience with creating a monster.
Mind Candy were proficient at scrum - with 2 week long sprints, retrospectives, sprint planning and daily stand-ups that were exceptionally well run. I picked up a ton of product & project management knowledge from this role, too.
I also spoke at our company conference in Euro Disney on “User Testing with your Mum”
Senior UX Designer (User Journey’s, User Testing, Interactive Prototype, Sketching)
2013-2014
As a senior UX designer in a new team, much of my effort was spent transitioning a large design project from one of London’s biggest agencies, to our new in-house team, whilst working alongside our dev agency to build pi.com v2.
This involved redesigning complex interactions on the booking journey, content mapping + wireframes for hotel information pages, and working alongside visual designs to polish the UI.
Our greatest project challenges centred around stakeholder communication, above and below. With constant push back from the dev agency, along with budget constraints, we were forced to redesign many aspects of the site in light of ever revealing technical limitations and director level input. Lots of moving parts - good communication was essential.
Senior UX/Product Designer
2014
Listora helps event organisers promote their events to leading UK publishers such as the Timeout.
Our goal was to collect structured event data in way that is aligned with the mental models of a variety of different event organisers. It wasn’t as straight forward as we initially thought!
We worked through the personas and related the different types of events with each one. We prioritised the personas accordingly, and built out the capability of the UI, working with a team of front-end devs.
We used a range of tools and techniques to deliver the live product; Heuristic Eval, Personas, Affinity Diagrams, Paper Wireframes, HTML prototypes and Remote Usability Testing.
Senior UX Designer
2014
We supported our early stage portfolio companies discover market fit by testing assumptions (lean methodology) and by designing out their minimal viable products.
Prioritising what to execute is critical as resource is especially tight at the beginning of a business. There were no convoluted designs and given my experience in development, building for technical simplicity was high on our priority list.
We were simplifying the primary journey for customers booking a cottage holiday in the UK, whilst figuring out how to integrate a variety of booking systems, all with different options, and whilst keeping the UI consistently simple and delightful!
Making it easier for small businesses to send parcels. Every part of the process from inputting the parcel weight, comparing prices, and inputting addresses - we attempted to streamline.
UX Designer
2012
Discoveredd was a product discovery & social ecommerce platform that rewarded it’s users financially if their recommendation leads to a sale.
A proof of concept project, I worked alongside the founder to bring to life his idea through sketches, and then with a visual designer.
Founder
2011-2013
This was a fun project!
Conceptualising, designing and building out a food mapping site.
Share your locally grown food with your neighbours!
Team of 3. We won an UNLTD & Channel 4iP social entrepreneur award back in 2011.
Lead UX Designer
2016
Agency side, I was lead UX designer for the redesign of a local government portal.
We engaged in a range of requirements gathering from business analysts, council workers and end users. This allowed us to clearly sketch out the user journey’s and get buy in before moving onto design. I worked within the technical constraints, business needs, the users needs to create the journey’s, flows and wireframes that helped inform the development of the product, along with an interactive Invision Prototype (a version of which can still be found here.)
I’ve included to the left a few pages from the final deliverable document that was used for development.
Personal Project
2015
A ‘digital foreplay assistant’ that improves physical intimacy in relationships through erotic inspiration. You simply press play and follow along...
I designed and built the MVP of Blindfold from its conception using HTML/CSS/JS for the web build and Pixate for the interactive mobile prototype and worked alongside writers and voicer artists to deliver the product to my audience.
This evolved into Pillow.
UX Designer
2009-2011
We designed a platform for the sharing economy - way ahead of its time!
For 10 years now, I’ve been building complex web applications, focusing on the architecture of products vs websites. This is one of my more earlier examples.
With a clean slate and a team of four we built a social web app for renting and managing shared planes and boats back in 2009.
Fresh out of an MSc in Human-Computer Interaction & Ergonomics from UCL we were in full research swing with a plethora of techniques we wanted to try in the real world.
Here’s a quick case study:
PROBLEM
Co-owners need to schedule the use of their shared asset.
CHALLENGES
Our first challenge would be designing a scheduling system that is flexible enough to work for different domains: planes, boats, cars & property. It also needs to integrate with our other tools: bill- ing & maintenance.
Is it a booking system? Calendar? Agenda? To do list? We weren’t sure, so we conducted interviews at multiple local airfields as well as performing a competitor analysis.
INTERVIEWS
The semi-structured interviews revealed a lot about group organisation as well as bookings. Insights such as:
- Some groups used generic booking tools whilst others had a single member in charge using Excel.
- Members were often assigned roles within groups.
- Work load was rarely distributed evenly.
- Booking length variedly greatly.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
We spent a short time looking at our competitors and understanding the problems they try to address. It helped ensure we didn’t miss anything obvious.
DEFINING BOUNDARIES
“What is simple is understood. What is understood get’s done.” - McKinney Rogers strategy execution consultancy.
Given all the knowledge we gained from the company strategy, user research & competitor analysis, we defined our design boundaries enough to give focus in the sketching phase but not so much as to restrict design exploration.
- Focus on groups that own planes (but keep in consideration marine & property co-ownership)
- For the first release, let’s design for groups that own just one high value asset.
- Focus on bookings, not a generic group event calendar
- A waiting list feature is critical as conflicts are regular
- It might be a good idea to separate out ‘maintenance’ bookings.
WIREFRAMES
The wireframes were designed at varying levels of fidelity, depending on the need. Balsamiq is excellent for high level layout without any attention given to the visual design.
USABILITY TESTING
We conducted a think-aloud study to gather some feedback. We removed the ‘make a booking’ page because of the confusion caused by a 2 panel layout. We discovered our users were more comfortable using a grid style, such as a weekly view. This also supported groups with a higher volume of bookings which fitted into GoShared’s strategy.
PROCESS FLOW
The booking system included a sign up and payment process. There were a few complexities with this journey and thus I used flow charts to think through and communicate the logic that needed to be built.
