I'm a design leader and systems-thinker who builds the practice as well as the product.Twenty years turning briefs and problem statements into clear, compelling product and service experiences — and leading the teams, operations, and AI tooling that ship them.
About
I'm a UCD consultant and design lead working across UK Government — most recently at FCDO, UK Export Finance, Ofgem, and the Home Office — leading user-centred design on services that must meet GDS and WCAG standards.
Over twenty years, I've designed for some of the most demanding organisations in government and industry: the Care Quality Commission, HMRC, the Scottish Government, Canon Medical, Nationwide and British Airways. These are places where getting it wrong has real consequences.
I work across the whole design process — discovery, research, interaction design, design systems and high-fidelity prototypes — and I lead the teams and operations that deliver it — whether that's leading a squad or going deep as the senior hands-on designer on a programme. I work AI-first, using agentic workflows to speed up and strengthen design, while keeping the evidence, judgement and accountability firmly human.
Beyond client work, I run the practice as a product: UCDOps® (the studio), Sprintpilot® (embedded design leadership), and UCDOps® Agent (ucdagent.com) — an AI-assisted UCD pipeline I designed and built, now in use on live engagements. AI carries the weight; the human keeps the judgement.
Available for senior and lead design roles — contract or permanent, UK & US (remote).
Experience
Twenty years designing and leading across government, finance, healthcare and enterprise.
Engagements delivered through my consultancy — often concurrent, titled per contract.
Capabilities
I cover the full user-centred design spectrum — and the operations and leadership that make it ship. AI-first, evidence-led, accountable.
Design craft
- User research
- Service design
- Interaction design
- UX design
- UI design
- Product design
- Prototyping
- Design systems
Leadership & operations
- UCD Leadership
- Design ops
- Design sprints & workshops
- Mentoring & coaching
- Standards & governance
- Stakeholder alignment
- Team upskilling
AI-first ways of working
- Agentic AI workflows
- Prompt engineering
- Spec & lean coding
- AI-accelerated research synthesis
- Automated design documentation
- AI tooling assessment for secure contexts
What drives me
Engineering roots. Design judgement. Still closing the gap.
I didn't start in design. I have a bachelor's degree in electronics and instrumentation and training in automobile engineering, have a master's degree in computer applications, and began as a software engineer at Nokia, Wipro, Yahoo, and IBM — building things before I designed them. That engineering grounding never left; it's why I'm comfortable in code, in systems, and now in AI tooling that most designers keep at arm's length.
What pulled me toward design was the same thing that keeps me here: the gap between how organisations think a service works and how it actually works for the person on the other end. Closing that gap — especially in public services where the stakes are highest and the users are often the most vulnerable — is the work I care about most, and the fastest way to close it at scale is to lead the teams doing it.
Twenty years in, I'm more curious than ever. AI is rewiring how design gets made, and rather than resist it I've gone deep — embedding agentic workflows into real UCD teams. But the principle hasn't changed: AI carries the weight, the human keeps the judgement.