I have almost a decade of experience in designing interfaces for data-heavy products, internal business tools and consumer applications, across all platforms.
I excel at shaping early stage ideas: I worked with startups, frequently as their first product hire, to help them find a direction for their product. I have experience in running design sprints and in setting up processes and guidelines for user research. I rely on analytics, usability testing, and feedback from stakeholders and users to make product decisions.
My background is technical, I learnt web development at university and started my career as a front end developer for a marketing agency. These days I code primarily for my own projects (like this site). I still enjoy setting up my own server or experimenting with the latest framework. I think this makes me pretty good at weighting the limits and opportunities of a particular approach.
I believe good design is long lasting, exists outside trends, and looks obvious in hindsight. I see usability and standards as useful constrains to be leveraged.
I also write a lot. I have a blog, where I annotate my thoughts on technology. And I maintain a couple of other sites. The web is where my heart is. Since I can remember, building stuff for the web has been my passion.
I can help you with
- Define what to build and why
- Understand your users
- Prototype and test quickly
- Define patterns that work across a set of products
- Set up the foundations of your design practice
How I work
- Share often, share early
- Embrace constrains
Connect with me
Example work
B2B Product
Real time insights for high street merchants — An insights platform providing product and customer insights to high street retailers.
B2C Product
Linking loyalty cards to bank cards — Instant, frictionless, rewards as you pay delivered straight to your bank.
B2C Product
Native digital receipts in banking apps — Guidelines for banks to enrich their transactions with item-level data.
B2B Product
Integrating with POS systems — How we scaled Flux, from manual integrations to self-servicing.
Operations
A brief guide to user research — A guide I wrote to expand practice beyond the design team.
Roles
Product Designer at Starling Bank
My current role. No details for now :)
Senior Product Designer at Flux
I joined Flux as an early employee, their fifth hire and first product hire, working closely with the CEO and our retail and bank partners (Monzo, Barclays and Starling) to define the product. When I joined Flux had less than 200 customers, we've now (2022) hit over 1M customers and delivered over 10M receipts.
- Product managed and designed from scratch our B2B analytics platform for high street merchants
- Shipped, with another engineer, our first self-onboarding experience for retail partners
- Worked with partner banks to define our customers onboarding journey
- Run several research and testing sessions, for B2B and B2C products
- Created design guidelines to ensure consistency across projects and teams
- Designed and coded an old version of our company site
- Owned several growth experiments and features end to end
Product Designer at Football Whispers
I was moved to Football Whisper from Klood, its parent company. We built a set of tools for sports media companies to navigate and visualise the data collected during a game. Our app was adopted by Sky Media to generate infographics for their articles and videos.
- Worked closely with data science to define data patterns & visualisations
- Designed and documented the design system for the web interface
Product Designer at Klood Radar
At Klood I worked on my first complex B2B application, a tool for market research. I was in charge of the design process — from the discovery phase to the delivery phase. Our product team was small and operated similarly to Basecamp's Shape Up process.
- Contributed to product requirement documents
- Worked closely with two engineers. Together we designed, iterated, and shipped the first version of the app
- Designed and documented the UI components following atomic design principles
- Designed and built the company site (Wordpress)
Web Developer at CNR (IIT Pisa)
Hired to work on a digital storytelling project with “Gruppo Digitale l’Espresso”, one of the main publishers in Italy. The visual essay used interactive data visualisations (built in D3.js) to make the narrative more engaging.
Education
I studied digital humanities first at the University of Pisa and later as a postgraduate at King's College London.
My studies were focused on computational linguistics, human computer interaction and web development. The courses ranged from traditional modules of computer science to linguistics.