Profile

Overview

I am a senior user experience designer, researcher, strategist and manager. I love making better products and services by applying system thinking, interaction design and information architecture skills on a bedrock of user research. I enjoy exploring new domains, developing individuals and teams, challenging conventions and building consensus about new ways to make complex processes simpler.

I have more than 18 years of experience creating digital products with teams both in-house and at agencies. I have worked with clients ranging from a one-person start-up to very large corporations (Apple, Rightmove, Spotify, American Express, London Borough of Brent, Emirates Airlines, Bupa, Samsung, BSkyB, Tesco, and the World Bank…).

Designer 
From early idea generation through rapid collaborative sketching, to detailed interaction specs (wireframes or interactive prototypes), I create designs with great interaction design, usability and accessibility that meet business goals.
 I enjoy working as part of an integrated team with visual designers and developers. This ensures all constraints are designed for, and that everybody's knowledge and craft feed into a coherent result.

Strategist
It's hard to achieve results or enjoyable collaboration when the direction is unclear. I can help bring that missing clarity to any team. Working with people individually and collectively, I can understand what is important to them, identify and discuss assumptions to ensure that everybody has common goals.
 This can then be broken down into prioritised roadmaps of experiments to achieve the most results as quickly as possible while reducing risk .

Leader
On top of helping people to be clear on their purpose and roles, I enjoy discovering the specifics of any individual’s skills, allowing them to shine and grow. 
 My research background and appetite for continuous  improvement also help me identify inefficiencies in process and address them. One particular interest of mine is helping colleagues help each other through critique sessions.

Researcher
Built on solid foundations from my MSc in Human Computer Interaction from UCL, my toolkit covers all qualitative (usability testing, ethnography, diary studies,  interviews, card sorting) and quantitative (analytics, surveys) methods.  Working with the teams I can synthesise learnings for the most effective communication, whether it is a workshop, presentation, personas, interaction flows, jobs to be done or experience maps and system blueprints.

Complexity ➔ Simplicity
I am comfortable dealing with complex domains, understanding them before being able to focus well and achieve simplicity.I practise system thinking: everything is part of something bigger and interacts with many other entities, whether we're looking at an interactive element, a team member or a service. Understanding these relations and their related Information Architecture is key to achieve results and avoid unintended consequences.

Innovator
I am permanently looking for ways to improve things, and am particularly keen and adept at seeing where new technologies can be applied to solve real problems. Particular interests are mobile and tablet apps and voice interfaces. I believe voice and natural language processing are now mature enough for many uses, as I demonstrated during the Rightmove Hackathon 2018, which the team I lead won with such a working concept.