Imagining, creating and moving forward good products that work for humans and business goals, while creating positive outcomes.
Skills, frameworks and models
Here are core skills I use regularly with a bit of what they mean so it's not entirely nonsense. Hopefully this provides a glimpse into what I can bring to your organization, and what I enjoy spending my time doing.
Product design
Impact measurement
Implementing measurement to track and evaluate success with data and stories ensuring products and services deliver real value on an individual or population level.
Research and insights
Doing deep research to figure out how to solve problems, discover pain points and opportunities, create delightful experiences, focus on true value, and understand the humans using your product or service.
Accessibility
Making inclusive and usable products and removing barriers that ultimately make better products for everyone - and doing this in a sensible and sustainable way.
Design management
Guiding designers and teams, creating processes, and developing operations so that designers can do their job, creativity can flourish, and outcomes are improved.
Trauma informed design
Designing thoughtfully and carefully while using experience and listening to humans, to create safe and supportive experiences that try to prevent re-traumatization.
CX design
Shaping every touchpoint in a journey for better, and more supported, customer interactions that create bigger impact.
Customer development
Doing the ground work to uncover who the audience is, what they need, what they're willing to pay for or engage in, and starting a waiting group of people for your course, product or service to begin with.
Survey design
Crafting effective surveys that have research goals in mind, remove bias, allow for discovery, drive informed decision-making and don't drive humans crazy.
Information architecture
Organizing content and systems to improve navigation and findability usually in courses, websites, complex products, and learning design.
Design sprints
Creating and facilitating sprints with team to generate and validate ideas and quickly prototype or work out how to test them.
Data analysis
When you have specific challenges, spending time analyzing the data that exists to learn from what is there and can point us to solving it.
Conversation design
Designing natural interactions that make digital chat experiences ethical, inclusive, comfortable, and human, while dialling down the frustration.
Systems thinking
Zooming out and linking our challenges back to larger issues to work out what we're influenced by, how we can act, where we should (and should not) act, and where the levers in the system are so you can have a much greater impact.
UX design
Designing human experiences that are (hopefully) beautiful and functional. While data is important, it's also increasingly leading to less satisfying experiences. I combine real human desires and needs, data, and organization goals to hopefully balance this and make better services and products that feel better.
Product management
Creating clarity in direction by deeply understanding product needs, aligning teams, goals and strategy, and translating it to create actual working plans and realistic roadmaps. Working out what all the insights mean to turn implement changes (and what we should ignore or discard). Reconcile issues and priorities between teams. Improve all the product operations and processes. Provide collaboration and support to Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and Execs.
Positioning and messaging
Helping businesses and charities understanding what their position is, what is their advantage in the market, and what they should be messaging (whether to attract the right audience, develop the right content, create behavioral change, pitch for funding, or hit marketing).
Translating science and academia
Spending hours reading academic materials and working with researchers, academics, clinicans, public health officials, and environmental scientists to take their expertise and translate it into real world service, products, business modelc changes, commerce, or behavioral change.
Prototyping
Quickly bringing ideas into a low-fidelity, practical enough existence to test, refine, and validate concepts before launch (and therefore before spending more time and money on the wrong thing).
Design Ops
Streamlining workflows, tools, and collaboration to create more effective design processes and space for teams to work and explore. Developing processes that make working with designer teams a better process for other teams too.
Engineering management
Understanding engineers and technical talk. Working out the best processes for communicating on complex products, making decisions between competing needs, and liaising with other teams and execs. Ensuring we build high-quality products with the right-fit and scale and creating happier developers.
Behavioral change design
Using research, psychology and design to create experiences that drive changes to behavior, and measuring this to see what works, and what needs to be amended over time.
Content design
Writing and reviewing for clear, engaging, and useful content that helps organizations convey what they need to, people to engage how we'd like them to, and creates experiences people want to be part of.
Learning design
Developing engaging and effective learning experiences that people want to take part in, find useful or exciting, talk about to others creating a positive loop, and actually use (as measured by data and feedback).
Workshop facilitation
Designing and leading fun workshops for a whole host of things such as idea generation, launching quickly, changing employee experience, fixing services, creating and working out innovative new services, understanding problems etc.
eCommerce
Creating good looking and high-converting digital commerce experiences in ethical spaces. I create revenue but I try to stay away from encouraging overspending or consumerism.
UI design
Designing the interfaces of the products, courses, and websites I work on. Hopefully nice interfaces that are fairly seamless to use and maybe even make someone happy, surprise them, or make them feel good (without them realizing why).
Ethical manufacturing
A genuine attempt to create physical products that support all the workers involved, reduces our destruction of the environment, has a positive impact on the communities along the supply chain, and allows the end human to feel better about their purchase.
Low-waste design
Reducing waste and inefficiencies in design and production processes, creating sustainable and more responsible solutions.
Employee experience design
Understanding employees that work with beneficiaries and working with them to design workplaces, processes, tools, and cultures that allow them to flourish, do their job better, have a greater impact, go home feeling supported, reduce churn, increase positive feedback, make recruitment easier, and ultimately meet org goals.
Content strategy
Planning and managing high-quality, interesting and gives-a-shit content so you know what content to create, who to create it for, where to create it, and how it will be best consumed. Designing pillars, systems and teams to do this in-line with your needs, schedules and goals.