Principal Product Designer

• Product direction: discovery, customer interviews, user research, problem framing, usability testing
• AI: working prototypes built with AI coding tools, AI-assisted design workflows, AI-ready design systems and content standards
• Domain: sports performance data, data visualisation and dashboards, complex B2B workflows, fintech
• Craft: interaction design, design systems, accessibility, design education across engineering teams

Kitman Labs is a sports performance SaaS company whose clients include the Premier League, FA, NFL and MLS. I mainly work with the Premier League, leading the user experience design on the products club staff use to plan training sessions, import performance and physical data, track how players are progressing, and build data visualisations and dashboards.

It’s a fast-moving environment, and I’m usually across several projects and product areas at once. I use customer interviews, research and data to shape what we build, and I build high-fidelity, working prototypes with AI coding tools so ideas can be tested with club staff before engineering starts.

I’m also reshaping our product design and research workflow around AI, using it to help create, organise and serve our design system, content standards and component library.

I joined AWS (Amazon Web Services) as the first UX designer in its Availability department, and one of the first in Dublin. When something breaks on the AWS network and causes a major outage, this department helps resolve it and restore service as quickly as possible. I designed the tools and interfaces engineers use to gather information about an outage and coordinate the fix, working with teams in Dublin, Sydney and Seattle.

As the first UX designer many of the engineers had ever worked with, a big part of my role was design education and evangelism: I was the person in the room reminding everyone about the human who had to use the tool. I did lots of user research with the department’s diverse range of internal customers, and worked closely with engineers to understand very complex technical systems, legacy integrations and security restrictions.

I moved in-house to WorldRemit, a fintech startup helping emigrants send money to their families back home. Every two weeks, we invited real users into the office, and the usability sessions I ran with them informed our whole design process. We also travelled to key destination countries to see what the experience was like for people receiving money.

Agency-side work for big brands on high-pressure projects. I worked on The National Trust website and apps, and Cathay Pacific’s flight booking website. I was promoted to Lead UX Designer for a pregnancy app for Mumsnet, then led UX on Honda Europe’s car configurator.

I finished running the UX team for the HSBC account: a touchscreen ATM interface, a peer-to-peer foreign exchange app, login journeys for their banking app and website, HSBC’s global UX principles, and a ‘banking interfaces of the future’ vision piece.

Led UX on the BBC side of the redesign of its intranet, Gateway, including a large research project with staff across England, Scotland and Wales.

New digital products for Rough Guides and DK.

Branding, print and digital, including my first digital product: an online community for spread betting traders.

Visual Communications, First Class Honours. I’ve since given visiting lectures to IADT’s UX design master’s students.

I write and produce a documentary podcast called Yarn | A Story Podcast, covering stories from the history of disability to a Nazi spy in Ireland during WW2, the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the palace of a corrupt dictator. I research, write, record, edit, interview, perform voiceovers, direct actors and collaborate with composers. It has been featured in the Guardian, the Irish Independent and the Irish Examiner, and won Best Factual Podcast at the Irish Podcast Awards and Best Indie Podcast at the Signal Awards.