CV
I help multidisciplinary teams deliver services in a user centred way by designing accessible experiences.
I'm a design leader with 16 years of experience in the public and private sectors, currently working as Lead Interaction Design at HMRC working within the Government Gateway.
I have worked in various industries on several high-profile projects, including HMRC, NHS, Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), Sky Bet, British Airways, Royal Mail, GOV.UK, Sky Sports, Argos, and Jet2.
At The Department for Work and Pensions I successfully led the design and delivery of a politically charged service go-live. Joining teams from multiple sites and disciplines to produce a challenging service.
In the past, I have worked contracting or as a permanent member of the team for all sizes of companies. I pride myself on being very easy to work alongside and have often slotted smoothly into any team and delivered some great services and websites.
I have often worked in UK government departments or NHS within Scrum teams. I usually am known as an interaction designer, building my designs as working prototypes (in HTML/CSS/JavaScript) for usability testing.
I also help support the community by sharing my expertise with designers, developers and other professions.
More recently, I have been a principal user experience designer, using my experience to improve the digital culture and client experiences, developing and growing a team of designers and creating a safe community to learn, share and ask questions. I also work within public sector organisations, working with designers, scrum teams, and product teams whilst cracking those hard-to-solve design challenges, and leading complex and high-profile design projects in tough environments from conception to launch.
I am currently SC cleared and I have BPSS clearance.
Experience
DEFRA
(Contract) Lead Interaction Designer, April 2023 - Present
HMRC
(Contract) Lead Interaction Designer, January 2023 - March 2023
Leading the interaction design direction of the project, presenting and offering solutions to stakeholders and the wider team. Using Figma to support presentations and workshops, and the ever brilliant HTML (Government) prototype kit for user research and handover to the development team.
I also mentor and offer support with HMRC's great interaction design community.
NHS Digital
Lead Interaction Designer, Apr 2022 - January 2023
Responsible for all UCD practitioners within the Reverification team, shaping the strategy, execution and improving ways of working whilst embedding consistent and high-quality professional standards. Also, working closely with programme directors to develop design concepts via HTML prototypes or basic Figma prototypes.
Hippo Digital
Principal User Experience Consultant and Profession Lead, January 2022 - January 2023
Leading a team of 28 UX designers, taking ownership of development, recruitment and creating structures to provide support for wellbeing, as well as helping stakeholders across organisations understand the value of user centred design, building and managing strategic relationships, finding new opportunities and advising as a senior design leader.
Department for Work and Pensions
Senior Interaction Designer, March 2021 - January 2022
As the lead designer within DWP's first design system's team, my team's mission is to create a usable, community-built service that allows, as a Government department to deliver something as best we can, that will lead to improvements in accessibility, performance and shared knowledge across all teams.
Improving the contribution model, which in turn allowed designers to control the process, and make situational decisions.
Senior Interaction Designer, January 2019 - March 2021
As the Senior Designer for the program of welfare reform, my role was to drive forward a key part of one of the biggest and highest-profile digital transformation programs in the world.
Supporting over 20 million people, this department is responsible for over 730 million benefit payments each year.
Sky Betting and Gaming
Senior Product Designer, August 2016 - May 2019
As the Senior Digital Designer of the Sky Games team, I managed a team of designers, work alongside multi-disciplinary teams to assist in the delivery of a first-class, user-centred experience for a vast number of users.
Freelance/contractor
Digital Designer and Front-end Developer, November 2013 - Aug 2016
Premier Food Safety
Lead User Interface / Interaction Designer & Front-end Developer, September 2010 - November 2013
Nicolas Associates Software
Creative Web Developer, April 2009 - January 2010
Yorkshire Post
Web Designer, March 2008 - July 2009
Notible projects
NHS - Reverification
The Reverification service aims to support the overall demographics programme by encouraging citizens to update their own demographic data, therefore improving the quality of demographic data.
Led the design initiative and direction to ensure the project ran from Discovery and Alpha smoothly. Managed a full design team, delivering a user centred approach within a tough development phase, using Discovery to understand user needs and Alpha to iteratively prototype and explore technical options.
DWP - Design system
Working as the lead designer, I helped establish the process and ways of working within a team that was, in previous months very delivery-led.
I kickstarted a community and contribution based way of sharing work, how to incorporate and use DWP's patterns within our prototypes and how to provide the design system with the right type of feedback to put patterns in the design system.
My role also included prototyping, presenting to stakeholders and working alongside MOD, MOJ, GDS, NHS, and DEFRA to ensure consistency amongst all design systems was met.
Universal Credits - Covid response team(s)
Leading "pop-up" teams to delivery design outputs quickly and accurately to cater for the influx of applications for Universal Credits. We managed to support 1+ million applications and lower the impact on the call center.
Outputs were html prototypes, supporting user research (remote testing) and presenting to ministers to showcase the goals.
Universal Credits - Move to Universal Credits
(Presentation available upon request)
Discovery based project, where the aim was to support users upon being moved to Universal Credits by 2024. Work included leading workshops around ideation sessions, meeting and presenting back to stakeholders and ministers and delivering a presentation to an internal board to ensure budget and the project was ethical.