CV & experience

Steve is such a rare talent, that you could quite easily go your whole career without ever meeting a designer like him.

He has the practical design chops to deliver top-tier execution at pace, the design ops knowledge to act as a multiplier for the team and a strategic approach to problem solving that makes him a Product Thinker on par with the best product managers I know.

Steve makes flitting between vision, strategy and execution look absolutely effortless. During our time spent working together Steve was a top 1% contributor to achieving our OKRs and architecting the UX strategy — but I expect he would always under sell this!

A 1-in-a-million designer and fantastic team mate.

I have had the great pleasure of working with Steve during my time at Wilko. Steve is without doubt, one of the most talented Senior UX Designers I have had the pleasure of managing.

Steve is extremely collaborative and will always bring new ideas to the table around ways of working; he works extremely well within the agile development model, supporting in driving forward the company objectives while ensuring the customer’s voice is always present to ensure a customer centric approach.

Steve has the ability to really get under the skin of a problem, whether this is through User Journey Mapping, to understand the pain points and challenges the customer faces, through their omnichannel journey, or through undertaking deep competitor analysis to understand the digital landscape where the feature will be operating. Steve always has the customer front and centre of his mind; he continually looks for opportunities to improve the UX of Wilko.com and has a wealth of ideas waiting in the wings.

To sum up, Steve is the full package when it comes to UX, be this from obtaining a deep understanding of the customer need in the discovery phase, through testing of prototypes to seek customer opinion, on to final implementation working in collaboration with the development team to ensure the UX vision is realised.

I would highly recommend Steve and I look forward to any opportunities I have to work with him in the future, he’s an all round great guy and someone I would have on my team in a heartbeat.

I simply cannot speak highly enough of Steve, or the calibre at which he works and the amount of knowledge, insight and passion that he brings to everything he does.

Steve cares about customer experience and using insight and research to drive enhancements and designs, far beyond any usual degree you’d see from a UX Designer. I’d even go as far as to say that Steve is infatuated with giving customers the best possible experience within every area he touches and/or designs.

His heuristic research and focus is unrivalled. His understanding of customer buying journeys and what customers expect and are delighted by is second to none, and he carries himself with such professionalism.

It’s been an absolute pleasure working with Steve. His intuition, drive and skill set have been absolutely essential within the digital transformation seen at wilko, and his designs and hard work have resulted in a 12 month roadmap of website and mobile experience based content, with over £15m in additional revenue for the business.

Steve will be a huge asset to any business that has the fortune of employing him, as he will continually go above and beyond to always exceed any expectations.

For the first time in my career, I experienced a role that just didn’t feel right, from the steep learning curve of clinical care to the organisation setup and nature of the work. Shortly after leaving, other members of the leadership and design team promptly followed and the UK arm of the business was sold to a competitor months later.

• Designing flexible CMS components for content editors to use in Umbraco
• Setting usability design standards and guidelines for the design system
• Defining requirements and use cases with the business analyst
• Mapping digital journeys and touchpoints using an emotive framework for appeals and campaigns
• Analysing insights and research findings from the insight team
• Monitoring user behaviour in Hotjar and looking out for user pain points
• Testing copy and messaging with remote participants in Wynter
• Governing and advising internal stakeholders and third parties on how to apply patterns using the design system
• Leading on comms projects requiring accessibility consideration
• Digital creative and art direction for the biggest annual campaigns
• Rolling out UI and interaction standards to the wider digital estate and third party sites

After being hit by a major cyber incident, the digital roadmap was deferred and all focus was placed on recovering and rebuilding internal systems for a minimum of 3 years. I was repositioned within the organisation to work on digital creative for social and PPC for the foreseeable future, which wasn’t where I wanted to be.

• Facilitating co-design & requirement gathering workshops with clients
• Prototyping from low fidelity sketches and wire-flows through to high fidelity, production ready
• Creating product style guides and themes for web/app development
• Producing and analysing CRO tests to improve performance of client sites
• Coaching junior designers, implementing new tools and processes
• Running card sorting and tree testing activities in Optimal Sort, analysing behavioural insights from Hotjar
• Preparing research studies along side external testing labs

I had been agency-side for most of my career and the projects I loved and excelled at the most were when I was embedded into big organisations to help with their digital transformation. But these types of relationships were few and far between in agency life. When the opportunity arose to join an in-house team at the start of their transformation journey, I followed that passion.

• Branding for new retail products and designing packaging and POS display
• UI and interaction design for WordPress, Drupal, Magento and progressive web apps
• Writing marketing content and propositions for startup websites
• Managing client relationships and several key accounts
• Introducing new tools and ways of working to enhance the digital output
• Creating pitch decks and concepts to help win work
• Mentoring junior members of the team to help them develop

Relocation was the primary reason, but I was keen to transition from purely visual design into a more specialised UX role. The opportunity at Hallam offered several key mentors in usability and experience design that would ultimately set my career path on a new course.