Contractor Work

Raised your hopes there didn’t I? My apologies!

Unfortunately, the nature of the work I’ve been doing means that a lot of it is under NDA, either because it will only ever be used internally, is for customers only or hasn’t launched yet, so I’m afraid I can’t really show you all of it, but I can talk about it…

Nimble Approach

Working on the future of the classroom.

I joined a small team at Nimble Approach to work on a classroom app project they were completing for Nord Anglia, a chain of private schools. I reworked the design of the app, which was split between teacher, student and shared classroom experiences, both to ensure best ux practice as well as consistency and reusability to support the development team’s efforts going forward.

Moody's Analytics

Creating a new web app.

Working with a small agile team, I joined Moody’s as it was completing the takeover of RiskFirst and it’s Pfaroe web platform of financial services apps. I lead the design of a new offering for financial clients to manage their staff pension programmes, and completed an overhaul of Pfaroe’s design system, Osiris.

The Scottish Parliament

Designing a new web platform and remote voting system.

I joined the Scottish Parliament’s web project in late 2019. The project had been in some difficulty with its design and usability, I reviewed and overhauled the existing design work, then helped to push the project forward. With the arrival of the pandemic, I also designed the Parliament’s remote voting system, allowing it to continue to operate through remote working and social distancing measures.

Lloyds Banking Group

Europe's Largest Digital Transformation Project, Insurance and Redesigning Halifax

With a budget of more than £200million, being delivered by the bank, Wipro and SAP, I was the lead designer on Lloyds’ Cash Management & Payments project. Part of the Bank’s Commercial Division, as well as designing the required work on LBG’s side, I also reviewed and signed off the work being done by the external partners, and additionally supported the Lloyds delivery team as they moved through the process.

In addition to CM&P, I also supervised the development of a Rental Insurance platform for Halifax, designed and built by an external partner, I reviewed work and supported that team to ensure that they met brand guidelines and fitted in with the design system. As part of this project I also participated in the internal efforts to design an entire new system for Halifax to go alongside their then new branding.

Finmo

Digital Mortgages

Finmo are a North American Fintech, with two offerings; Blink Mortgages, a digital mortgage broker, and Finmo, a web platform for mortgage brokers to manage their business and process applications online. I have been working with them as Lead Product Designer, overhauling the design language and UX of the public site experience and reviewing and improving their internal platform.

As the first designer ever used by the team, it has been particularly rewarding to help to build an understanding of design and the value that it brings to a business.

This work I can show off, see my work on Blink’s website and the Finmo webapp.

Scottish Widows

My first contract role, I joined the Pension Innovation Lab in Edinburgh, working wtih Designit.

As the Lead UI Designer, I arrived to find the two seperate teams within the Lab had been using their own fairly unique design standards, neither of which sat well with the then forthcoming new Scottish Widows public site (a project I worked on while still at Realise), so I was tasked with creating a UI Kit and Pattern Library that would bring the two pension platform projects together into a single, unified style that would sit well with the public version, without requiring what was already built to be dispossed of.

This was relatively tricky, both from a technical point of view and a personal one, as a new team member entering and trying to change the work of others who were already there! In the end we succeeded however, with some of the new Lab design language even filtering through into the public site.

Alongside this I worked on a new pension calculator that would be available after customers had logged in to their accounts, I worked across all aspects of this project, from planning meetings, to UX and user testing, not just the UI. Again this wasn’t just a design challenge, with a significant number of stakeholders all with differing views and goals to manage, we managed to deliver a novel solution that was designed to reflect the changed nature of the businesses customers since the advent of auto enrollment, and encourage those making minimal contributions to persist, and, if possible, increase their savings level.

Morgan Stanley

At Morgan Stanley I worked on two projects; an internal communication mobile app and a web app for stock brokers.

Working closely with UX Designers in New York and London, the mobile app reworked their existing design language to suit more modern iOS patterns and integrate user feedback from the previous version, while the stock broker platform was an exercise in efficency of information display, disagarding concerns over aesthetics for presenting as much data as possible in a clear, legible way.

Lloyds Banking Group

A single project contract for Lloyds through SapientRazorfish.

My task was to help with the redesign of an internal app that facilitated staff ordering currency for business trips. Similarily to my previous work for Lloyds, it largely involved applying new design standards to an old platform. On a particularly tight timescale, I arrived with an agile team that had fallen behind due to lack of design resources, and helped to quickly turn things around to the point that things were ahead of schedule, and all UI design work complete prior to the end of my contract.

CYBG

Clydesdale Bank had an impressively large UI / UX team focused on transforming the bank’s digital footprint.

In my time there I have helped add to an extensive Pattern Library that will govern all future public digital work for the groups three core brands; Clydesdale, Yorkshire and B and help to define the standards that future teams of permanent designers will work to.

My primary project however has been to redesign the internal system that is used in the call centres, back offices and branches that staff use to interact with customers. This has been quite a challenge, working closely with a UX Designer to understand and improve on a 20 year old system that is, charitably, best described as being a touch illogical! Full of broken fields, missing buttons and dead ends, we have focused on trying to simplify and smooth out its use, as well as bringing in more modern concepts of accessibility to the new design.

With management keen to extend the public design language to the internal systems, I devised a modified ‘shrunken’ version of the Pattern Library to better suit the differing pressures and use cases we faced, while still retaining an unmistakable visual relationship. Working with the team’s front end developer, we found a way to ensure that any component, whether designed for public or internal use, would work at either scale so as to be usable by both.