16 years experience.
My key strengths lie in taking super complex workflows and making them as simple for a person to use as possible. Completed projects include; a car configurator, an airline flight booking flow, banking logins, financial trading tools, payment and verification flows and chart/graph building tools.
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Kitman Labs
Dublin
Senior Product Designer
2022 - Present
As a sports fan I was delighted by the opportunity to work in the world of professional sports analytics. Kitman Labs is a sports performance SAAS platform. Clients include the Premier League, IRFU, FA, NFL, NBA and MLS.
I mainly work with Premier League soccer academies. It’s a very fast moving environment and I work across various projects and product areas at once.
I lead the user experience design on the products that club staff use to plan training sessions, import performance or physical data and build data visualisations and dashboards. Through my UX research I'm learning lots about sports science, how elite teams organise themselves and how they develop athletes.
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Amazon – AWS
Dublin
Lead UX Designer
2017 - 2022 (4 yrs 6 mos )
After quite a few years in London I felt the pull back to Ireland. I joined AWS (Amazon Web Services), in the AWS Availability department in Dublin.
If something breaks on the AWS Network and it causes a major outage, this department gets involved and helps to resolve the issue and restore service as quickly as possible.
I was employed as the first UX designer in the department (and one of the first in Dublin). I designed the tools and interfaces engineers use to gather information about an outage and to communicate with each other to resolve the issue. I worked with teams in Dublin, Sydney and Seattle.
Being the first UX designer many of the engineers had ever worked with, my role involved a lot of design education and evangelism. I was the person in the room reminding everyone about the human who had to use the tool we were building.
I did lots of user research to understand the needs of their diverse range of internal customers. The job also required plenty of collaboration with tech teams and customers, especially when it came to understanding some very complex technical systems, legacy integrations and security restrictions.
But hey, if everything was easy, it wouldn’t be half as fun figuring it out.
Since being back in Dublin, I also popped into my old College; Dún Laoghaire IADT, to give a couple of visiting lectures to their UX design masters students for their Design Futures module.
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World Remit
London
Product Designer, Lead Product Designer
2016–2017 (1 yr)
While working on a money transfer app for HSBC I developed an interest in fin-tech. I was also curious to see what it would be like to work in-house for a startup so I moved on to WorldRemit.
They had a great founding story and an ethical approach to fin-tech. World Remit’s primary goal was to allow emigrants to send money to their families back home.
Some of the issues we had to consider were;
What if the sender or the receiver doesn't have a bank account?
Sending money can be scary. How do we manage the sender and receiver’s anxiety?
How do we verify people’s identities and prevent fraud?
How do we explain exchange rates , particularly if the sender isn't familiar with the destination currency?
I developed my user research skills immensely in this role. Every two weeks we invited actual users into the office with different backgrounds and motivations. I ran usability sessions with them on whatever we were building and this informed our whole design process. We also travelled to a couple of our key destination countries so we could see what the experience was like for people receiving money.
Awards
World Remit Android app;
Digital Masters Award for Excellence in Product 2018.
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Digitas UK
London
Senior UX Designer, Lead UX Designer
2014–2016 (2 yrs 6 mos)
After a year at the BBC in a quasi-client role I was keen to get back agency-side and work for big brands on high pressure projects. I jumped in the deep end at Digitas UK. I started as a Senior UX designer working on a big brief for The National Trust. Our team re-designed their website and their app on 3 platforms: iOS, Android and Windows. It was a large team and they were challenging clients but it was great work. It was during this project that I really learned how to work with clients, sell ideas and explain concepts.
When The National Trust work wrapped I moved on to a project for the airline Cathay Pacific. I was a senior designer on their brief to redesign their flight booking website. It was a very complex project and it required lots of travel over and back to Hong Kong, where the client and dev team was based.
I was promoted to Lead UX designer for my next project: a pregnancy app for the popular parent’s website, Mumsnet.
Next up I was the UX lead on a project for Honda Europe. I headed a UX team and collaborated with the development team and clients on their new car configurator website.
I finished at Digitas UK running the UX team for the HSBC account. I worked on several projects for them: a touchscreen ATM interface, a peer to peer foreign exchange money transfer app, customer login journeys for their banking app and website, HSBC's global UX principles guidelines and a ‘banking interfaces of the future’ vision piece commissioned by their digital team.
Awards
Mumsnet Pregnancy Tracker app;
Featured in the Creative Review Annual 2015.
BIMA 2016 award winner, Best UX and Service Design.
BIMA 2016 award winner, Grand Prix Prize.
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BBC
London
UX Designer
2013–2014 (1 yr)
I was obsessed by the idea of working for the BBC. I loved their products and the ethos of their UX&D department. Especially their focus on accessibility, inclusive design and their dedication to user testing and in-depth research. After four attempts at applying for different roles I was finally successful in 2013.
I was the lead UX designer on the BBC side for a collaboration with an external agency. Our brief was to redesign the BBC’s intranet, called Gateway. I embarked on a massive user research project. I spoke to dozens of BBC employees at offices in England, Scotland and Wales. I ran workshops, tested concepts on users and collected requirements. Then I worked with the external agency to design and build the key elements we needed for the platform.
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Penguin Books
London
UI/UX Designer
2012–2013 (1 yr)
I was a huge fan of the Penguin brand so I jumped at the chance to join their recently established in-house digital team in their iconic headquarters at 80 Strand. I worked as a UX and UI designer on new digital products for their imprints Rough Guides and DK.
I designed the Rough Guides website, I worked with Google on a collaboration for an online version of the DK Animals book but the most significant product I designed was the DK Trip Planner: a website and app that allowed users to plan trips to famous city destinations. The content was taken from the famous DK travel guides.
Awards
Rough Guides website;
Future Book 2013 Publisher Website of the Year.
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Sparks Studio
London
Junior Graphic Designer
2009–2012 (3 yrs)
My first full-time job after I moved to London, Sparks was a small interdisciplinary design agency. I worked on branding, print and digital projects. I discovered my love for digital product design here. A startup hired the studio to collaborate on their concept: an online community for financial spread bet traders. We designed and built the platform called Pelican Exchange.
From then on I knew I wanted to specialise in digital products and services.
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ThreeSixty
Kilkenny
Junior Graphic Designer
2008–2009 (9 months)
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Education:
Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology
Dublin
2004–2008 (4 yrs)
Visual Communications BA, First Class Honours.
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Hobbies:
Yarn: A Story Podcast
I’m pretty obsessed with documentaries and learning new stuff.
I write and produce a documentary podcast. I’ve done a 3-part doc series on the history of Disability, a 2-part docu-drama about a Nazi spy in Ireland during WW2. I’ve taken listeners on a trip around the Chernobyl exclusion zone, on a ride-along with a New York police officer and into the bizarre palace of a corrupt dictator.
Irish Podcast Awards
Winner: Best Factual Podcast 2022
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Interested in:
Audio production, Ancient Rome, Pro Cycling, Tennis, Greek Myths, The Space Race, LEGO, Brutalist Architecture, Theatre, Documentaries, Transport Systems, Computer Game Design, VFX, Napoleonic Era Naval History , War Journalism, Economics, The Cold War.