Career history

Wicked Origami Ltd

Design engineer, and critical reflection practitioner

London / remote · own company

Front-end design and development consultancy and contracting, and structured critical-thinking sessions for people who make consequential decisions. Two practices, one habit: taking something tangled and making it legible enough to be judged.

Client name withheld

Senior User Experience Developer

Remote · permanent

The client is not named here, or on my CV, to keep them from being approached by recruiters.

Sole designer and developer of the front end for a commercial enterprise data-management product. Rebuilt and redesigned a Svelte prototype in Next.js, and worked with the AI research team to bring their tools to bear on complex data-management tasks without the interface becoming complex to match.

Private contracts and a career break

Independent

After resigning from Colossus I took a short career break, which was extended by an illness brought on by Covid-19. Fully recovered.

Colossus UK Limited

Head of User Experience and Design

Remote · permanent

I worked on greenfield product and business-development design here. The company’s public websites, branding and released products were the work of a previous designer and are not mine.

Visual design and user flows for an unreleased consumer product, backed by user research and focus groups, and worked out with domain experts so that a new interface still met the paradigms the industry had taught people to expect.

Led the design and QA teams: recruitment, mentoring, and the unglamorous personnel work including redundancies. Moved the design team onto Figma so remote designers, developers and stakeholders could work in the same file, introduced Cypress end-to-end regression testing, and pushed Agile and Scrum practice across the company. Designed and built a commercial showroom project in Next.js.

Calvin Klein

Senior Frontend Developer via Wunderman Thompson

Remote · contract

Part of the Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger e-commerce change programmes, working across the business, design and development teams and translating between them. Established design principles, development standards and a testing strategy, and worked on the Next.js implementation.

The part I cared about most was getting the development team to take ownership of user experience rather than treating it as something handed to them.

Johnson Matthey

Senior Tech Lead

Remote · contract

A greenfield B2B chemical engineering and manufacturing analytics portal: a data-management application with the analysis and visualisation needed to make decisions about critical manufacturing services. Built the design language, the React component library and the development strategy behind it.

Mentored the development and UX teams, and worked closely enough with product owners and stakeholders to understand the data requirements well enough to argue with them. Ran rapid application development sessions alongside the business analysis. Hired as Lead UI Designer and moved into the Tech Lead role within a month, keeping the UI and UX design work alongside it.

Mustard Systems

Lead UI Designer, Developer and UX Architect

London / remote · contract

Delivered a greenfield real-time sports betting application carrying sub-second price updates over WebSockets, and designed interaction patterns for it that became company intellectual property. Contributed to the React front end.

Set up the in-house delivery process: Agile teams for front and back end, and the recruitment of the developers, designers, project managers and scrum masters to fill them.

UK Government, Ministry of Justice

Lead UI Developer and UX Architect via Web Technology Group

London · contract

A greenfield data-management solution for the Ministry of Justice. Built and designed the UI prototypes with the project manager and product owner, carried the application requirements to the development team, and managed what stakeholders expected to get.

Code quality and accessibility were held to a standard throughout rather than audited at the end, which for a government service is the only way it ever actually happens.