Design leader and product discovery coach for early-stage things.

Latest blog posts

To build or not to build

You might hear advice that sounds contradictory: Build software earlier, or test your assumptions first. Which is right?

Breaking the Figma addiction

Yesterday I ended with the question: Does it always make sense to do Lean UX, and implement straight from wireframes?

Are we lean enough?

Today's #NaBloPoMo post is going to be less hands-on, and more philosophical. It's a reflection on yesterday's post:

Breaking down a design

Thanks to Amy Hupe, I learned that there's such a thing as National Blog Posting Month (#NaBloPoMo for short), and it starts today. So here we go with post number 1.

Learning product design

If you're learning Product Design, it can be overwhelming to know where to start and what should be in scope.

The elements of product design

Explaining product design as a stack of decisions built on top of a stack of knowledge. With apologies to Jesse James Garrett.

Work backwards

Any time you’re planning, spend some time working backwards. Ask “what’s the key state I’m aiming for?”, then ask “what unlocks or enables that?”. And repeat.

Talks

Working on the Real Thing

A talk on design/dev pairing and how tools might change in the future.

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The Elements of Product Design

or... if there's no ideal design process, how can I know what to do?

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Event storming

An intro and discussion of event storming and how it applied to our context

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User story mapping

Trained PMs and Designers on user story mapping

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Object-oriented UX

A workshop I gave to train 40 designers in OOUX

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Conceptual modelling

Why conceptual modelling should be part of every designer's toolkit, and three ways to do it

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Milkshakes, Jobs to be Done and Job Stories

Now ancient (2016) lightning talk about Jobs to be Done theory and practice, and the benefit of Job Stories over User Stories.

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Work

Yorkshire Wolds Heritage Trust website and visual identity

Visual identityInteraction DesignInformation ArchitectureVisual DesignSite build

Rebrand and website design/build.

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Relive — Kick-starting communities

Team LeadershipStrategyUX Research

Leading a tribe to explore a brand new opportunity space

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Relive — Rearchitecting the post module

Information ArchitectureInteraction DesignVisual Design

Rethinking a module that had grown unwieldy

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Farfetch — Understanding the jobs-to-be-done of luxury fashion merchants

Strategy

Discovering and communicating the primary user needs when selling luxury fashion online

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Marketplace tax and duty management

LeadershipInformation ArchitectureInteraction Design

Designing a simple tool for a complicated mission-critical problem

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TIM — Redesigning a legacy tool

StrategyUX ResearchInteraction Design

A ground-up redesign, founded on user research.

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Visual design challenges

Visual Design

Exercising typographical and graphic design skills

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TIM — Creating a new product from scratch

BrandingInteraction DesignVisual Design

A new product with an innovative stock screener.

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Design Mentor at Visa Beyond Plastic Design Jam

Mentoring

I coached a team designing the future of retail payments.

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Other Stuff

Design Team Wrapped for Figma

An experiment with the Figma API to generate end-of-year stats for your team. Try it here.

Whitelist

Product design and frontend Development for this record label A&R secret weapon, since acquired by a major record label.

2D/3D Motion Graphics

Motion graphics, 3D modelling & compositing. Contains some title sequences and infographics for TV. Also a 3D island intended to be explored in a choose-your-own-adventure style.

d3.js FX data visualisations

Some experimental interactive visualisations showing the positive/negative sentiment implied by buy/sell recommendations of a selection of currency pairs over time.

CNN Tonight

An animated, interactive carousel showcasing the anchors of the Tonight slot. Simulated 3D in 2D with scaling, mathematical positioning on an ellipse, and depth swapping.

Safety in Numbers

Infographics for a documentary following a cycle ride through the alps. These were accurate terrain maps modelled and animated in Cinema 4D.

Corinne Day

Website for legendary Vogue photographer Corinne Day. It's a large archive of thousands of images. I used Google Sheets as a database for maintainability, and ImageMagick and Gatsby.js for image post-processing.

Wallboardr - a virtual card wall for Agile development

Conceived as a less opinionated card wall than Pivotal Tracker. It was based on the idea you could create cards in lanes and #hashtag them for filtering, and then view them either grouped by iteration (for scrum) or by status (for kanban). About 80 people signed up to try it, but soon after this Trello was released, which was similar and more comprehensive. So I stopped development.

Lux - an HTML/JS presentation framework

A tool for creating presentations from plain text (in Jade format). They can be shared across the local network, or exported to static HTML. It supports code highlighting. See a demo here, and find the project on github.