I’ve worked with messy data, complex systems and knotty problems within challenging environments and legacy systems that seem nearly impossible to change. Regardless, I have an optimistic outlook and focus on finding realistic opportunities and ways to ensure positive impact and direction.

I’ll prioritise work with this in mind. I’m committed to designing responsible products and services, fostering sustainable and viable businesses, and working towards an organisation’s mission and goals. Along the way, I make and hold space for user-centred design and collaborative practices.

My optimism comes with a generous side of being able to see how things can go terribly wrong, which is very helpful to mitigate risks.

I spend the majority of my time learning, helping others learn, and demonstrating findings, which produces confident, informed, and deliberate team decisions.

I use various learning techniques, from discovery research, speaking to users, stakeholders, and experts, building prototypes, and producing high-fidelity designs, to usability testing, surveys, traffic data analysis, user journeys, and customer service data. This process is more or less formal, depending on the project and available resources. I’ll use recruitment agencies, usabilitytesting.com, Typeform or work with a data/business analyst.

I’ve also been known to chat with unsuspecting passersby and use taskrabbit.co.uk to book participants for expert interviews.

Whether I’m working independently, leading a team, or integrating a product and development team, I work openly and prefer using tools that are collaborative and accessible to designers and non-designers, such as Figma, Miro, Notion, and Google Docs.

I adopt existing team habits, like stand-ups, sprints, retros or design reviews. I implement strategies that help us work mindfully. For example, from day 1, creating a running project presentation/doc to make it easy to share with stakeholders at any stage. I run kick-off sessions to define briefs, plans, goals, and outputs together, and I will frequently check in with this plan and adapt to changing priorities and direction.

Look, collaboration doesn’t mean I will share EVERYTHING. I’ll keep a private pack of cookies in my bag.

I love trying out ideas, evolving them, and exploring alternatives. I create prototypes, mock-ups, interfaces, content, user journeys, service maps, information flows, models, and other artefacts to raise requirements and elicit feedback from users, stakeholders, and experts. These help us practically work through challenges together as a team and align aims and expectations.

Together we define when we think we’re done and ready to learn from the next stage.

And yes, after working for over 15 years, I’ve stopped adding ‘_FINAL_FINAL’ to file names and will Marie Kondo the s@$*t out of what doesn’t matter.

The interactions, interfaces and features I design are modular and created to sustain varying use cases, data and the evolution of the product or service. I’ll work based on an existing Design System or create one where there is none.

I share work in various formats, making it easier for others to provide feedback. I adapt communication to the different needs of stakeholders, generating knowledge that can be referenced and utilised across time. I develop templates and tools for the team to reproduce processes quickly and focus on adapting them intentionally for their needs.

I avidly used symbols and instances in Flash. It’s part of my DNA. If you know, you know.