People often ask me what I do — this is what I tell them.

User Research

Good products solve users' problems. I use one-to-one interviews, group studies and feedback analysis to get to the heart of what users want.

Prototyping

Having a clear grasp of the problem, I use combinations of paper, Axure and HTML/CSS/JS to sketch out possible solutions.

Testing

I use moderated user testing to get early feedback and online volume testing tools such as Userzoom to validate designs.

UI Design

A strong UI design supports both usability and branding. I develop prototypes into effective and usable user interfaces.

Front-end development

Coding late-stage prototypes in HTML/CSS/JS gives greater realism and allows for faster handover to developers.

Graphic Design

I started my career as a designer and have designed commercial branding systems that work seamlessly across print and web.

Test Driven Design

Learnings from the dev team

I’m in the middle of a redesign project at the moment and as usual Design Thinking played a great part in how I approached it. Design Thinking teaches us to put our effort into figuring out the problem properly before we even think about going near a solution. Then, when you have some solutions, test them all thoroughly.

So this is what we’ve been doing in this project. Plenty of time was spent with customers up front to ensure that we were focusing on the right things. The issues were clearly defined and solutions designed.

Right now I’m building out the prototypes and testing them to see how they perform, but here’s the thing: some of the prototypes clearly aren’t going to do very well in testing, that’s fairly clear before the tests even go live.


Design Thinking What and Why?

What it is and what it isn't.

So here I am at the back of the Dublin Tech Summit and one more speaker has just mentioned Design Thinking – I get a conference bingo point! The thing is, most of the speakers who refer to Design Thinking seem to have a rather vague idea of what it actually is, beyond it being the next buzzword that will solve all our problems. This is a shame because Design Thinking is actually very easy to understand, not all that complex and can actually solve all of our problems. That's a big claim but that’s what it does – it’s a defined process for solving problems, no more, no less.