Portfolio
Fourteen years, four chapters.
A designer who codes became a research-led design lead, then the person who built a design organisation, and now a product and design leader steering a product into agentic AI. The thread running through all of it: complex software, made usable, at ever-larger scale. Client work is mostly confidential, so the case studies are written rather than shown.
- I
The builder
I started where design meets code, designing and building the front end of a fraud-prevention suite while learning what it takes to ship. An early product I designed won the European Satellite Navigation Innovation Award and helped secure venture funding. Then I inherited three products that did the same things three different ways, and unified them into one suite on a design system the whole team built from.
A design system is a promise you make to every future feature.
Collecting the European Satellite Navigation Competition award, 2013. - II
The researcher
IDBS had made scientific software for twenty years without a single formal usability test. I introduced the practice, built a research panel of over 200 scientists on no budget, and wove testing into how products were made. Support tickets fell by a quarter. I was promoted to Lead within two years and took the research to customers across the UK, Europe, and North America.
Watch real people use the thing. Everything else is a guess.
On the road. Customer research visits took me to labs across the UK, Europe, and North America. Case studyBuilding a usability practice from zero
Cut UI-related support tickets by more than 25% by embedding usability testing into a 20-year-old organisation, powered by a 200+ scientist research panel built on zero budget.
Read the case study → Case studyReimagining data import for a lab inventory system
Cut the number of steps to import inventory data by more than two-thirds. A daily workflow users had dreaded, redesigned and met with relief.
Read the case study → - III
The leader
I joined a fintech with a powerful, code-driven product and no design organisation. So I built one: six designers and researchers across two countries, a design system, usability benchmarks on every release, and UX targets inside the company's own OKRs. In three years design maturity rose two levels and redesigns lifted usability scores by twenty points. Along the way the role grew into product strategy: I now work with the executive team on which bets to make, and author much of the strategy that goes to the board.
Design changes a company once it's measured like everything else.
Workshops with product, engineering, and clients: where most of the design leadership actually happens. - IV
The AI chapter
The work is now about AI: an AI-native design practice that lets a small team operate at scale, live concept workshops with senior client executives, and the design of agentic features that act rather than advise. The principle I've argued for throughout is simple. AI suggests, humans approve.
The hardest part of automation is trust, and trust is a design problem.
Before all of it: BSc (2:1) Entrepreneurship in IT, Technology and Business, University of Surrey, 2006 to 2010
Away from the screen I cycle, climb, and play squash, and I sit on the committee and captain a team at Stoke Park Bowling Club in Guildford. Bowls is also where bowlside.com came from: a side project I built for the sport, and a reminder that I still like making things.