Curriculum vitae

Soluis approached me to return to the company at a senior level to help manage and grow the design team. Although I was sad to leave Itison, I was excited at the prospect of all the new challenges that Soluis would offer me...and I was confident that I would be leaving Itison in a better place than when I joined! I also had the opportunity to work remotely in Australia for the first few months.

At Soluis I work with a variety of platforms, most notably emerging technologies such as AR and VR. Each project is different and we approach them with the goal of finding the best platform for the audience.

Responsibilities and key achievements:

• Interviewing and hiring design applicants.
• Managing and creating our internal design processes, allowing our work to be more maintainable throughout the team and easier for people working from home. This resulted in increased efficiency when collaborating with other designer's projects, and streamlining the onboarding of any new employees.
• Collaborating with clients, fleshing out their brief, and guiding them to the best possible medium, based on what problem they're trying to solve.
• Running experimental demos with AR & VR technologies to improve the output of our client-facing work in the future. This often involves using less accessible devices like the Microsoft Hololens to try and solve problems that users will face when these platforms become more readily available to people in the future. This has allowed the company a substantial head start in this field.

When itison contacted me, looking to hire a new designer, I jumped at the chance to work on a single product with over 1.5 million users! I gained a lot of valuable experience in this role.

Responsibilities and key achievements:

• Running bi-weekly A/B tests and workshops with users to improve the user experience across the customer and host facing portals. This allowed us to catch and remedy potential issues much earlier on in the process.
• Worked to improve the clickthrough rate of email campaigns, resulting in a notable reduction in bounce rates.
• Created a totally updated design system and documentation and porting older design files & systems into Sketch for maintainability within the team. This resulted in smoother, more orginised workflows and less ambiguity in our design patterns.
• Substantially redesigned the overall website to be more modern, attractive and user friendly.
• Created marketing and graphic materials for use on the website and social media. I was able to automate a lot of the manual repetitive tasks required of our team internally through various photoshop scripts, ultimately enabling us to dedicate more time to design improvements.

I left Soluis to work on an exciting start up in Edinburgh, on a freelance basis, to create an expense management application for company employees. This aimed to simplify the process of claiming and distributing company expenses.

Responsibilities and key achievements:

• Set out design sprints to work alongside the developers in producing an MVP for investors and local businesses. This allowed greater visibility of goals and timelines for the full team.
• Designed the overall user experience and interface for web, iOS and Android by creating user journeys, wireframes and protoypes.
• User tested prototypes, resulting in our ability make quick refinements to the MVP early on.
• Created a design system to be used across the native apps and Web, making it easier for future designers to build upon.

During this time I also released a helpful resource for designers in my spare time called Sketchsheets, which provides a wide variety of ready-to-print templates for the latest devices and platforms for designers to sketch out wireframes. Since doing so, it has gained significant adoption and is now widely used by universities and designers around the world.

After gaining experience working as a freelancer, Soluis asked me to become part of their team, on a permanent basis.

Responsibilities and key achievements:

• Designed the user experience and interfaces for a wide variety of multi-platform applications for a global client base, allowing me to become more efficient in designing for varying screen sizes.
• Worked with clients to flesh our their goals and involved them with the design process through various collaboration tools, resulting in happier, more informed clients.
• Created an internal design process, which involved including the designers with the clients much earlier on, and allowing time in estimates for constructive feedback and iterations.
• Successfully introduced systems for handing off spec guides and assets to our developers. This resulted in a substantial improvement in our team's efficiency when developing apps within game engines.

Starting out as a freelance designer, I gained invaluable experience in communicating with clients at all levels, and collaborating with them to convert their briefs into elegant solutions. During this time, I was involved with brand identity, game design and designing and developing a number of websites.