Sep 2007 - Jul 2011
Law Degree & Legal Practice Course
I attended the University of Leeds from 2007 to 2010, attaining a 2:1 Law LLB degree (ranking 17th in my cohort of ~220 students).
I then completed the Legal Practice Course (LPC) post-graduate diploma at the BPP University where I was awarded a Distinction. Modules I took during the LPC included Business Law and Practice and Intellectual Property Law.
Jul 2011 - Oct 2015
Legal Executive
After the completion of my Law degree and LPC, I became a Legal Executive in the field of Banking and Financial Services Law. I initially worked for Squire Patton Boggs, a large international law firm, and then moved on to the Yorkshire-based firm Gordons LLP in 2013.
During my time as a Legal Executive I progressed from working as part of a team of seven on banking and financial services transactions to managing my own caseload of corporate property finance transactions.
At both Squire Patton Boggs and Gordons I was part of a team which often had a large workload. I was able to efficiently prioritise my various roles, completing individual tasks to deadlines and also assisting the team with collective projects.
My experience in Banking Law helped me to build on my ability to work in a high pressure environment and use my initiative to handle unanticipated issues calmly and positively.
Oct 2015 - Feb 2016
Designer, Graduate Scheme
I e class="tag-label"ntered the world of tech via a graduate scheme at KPMG where I re-trained as a designer. My career change from law was driven by my ambition to work in a less prescriptive and more creative industry with greater opportunity for learning and growth.
My previous qualifications and experience meant I was able to bring to this role, and future roles, sophisticated analytical, problem-solving and commercial reasoning skills.
I initially joined the KPMG Learning Academy as an Instructional Designer where I gained valuable experience in designing for learning. This role included:
- Liaising with stakeholders on the subject matter of online courses
- Writing content for online courses
- Designing user interactions
Feb 2016 - Aug 2020
UX Designer & Senior UX Designer
I moved to a new KPMG team to train specifically as a UX/Product Designer. I worked for 5 years with a small team that designed and built a dashboard product to enable our clients to improve their customers’ experience based on data. I was also responsible for coding the front-end to implement my designs and I loved the balance of design and technical elements in this role.
During my time at KPMG I was able to rapidly expand my design skills and was promoted to Senior UX designer in 2018, where I was the lead designer on client projects. My role was varied and included a combination of product design for the core platform, designing bespoke implementations of the platform for clients, and coding the front end of those client dashboards.
I gained valuable experience in:
- End to end design, including high fidelity, interactive prototyping
- Responsive design
- Dashboard and data visualisation design
- Micro-interaction design
- Infographic design
- UI design
- Stakeholder management, including requirements gathering at scoping sessions and acting as a
- point of contact through the implementation and BAU phases
- HTML and CSS (primarily using LESS)
- jQuery and basic JavaScript
- Coding data visualisations using a mix of C#, the Highcharts library, and Javascript
Whilst in this role, my main achievements included designing and building a number of long-term, successful dashboards for household-name brands in the energy, airline and financial sectors and working on a redesign project for the core product, including leading a redesign of the reporting feature.
Sep 2020 - Dec 2020
Product & UX / UI Designer
I moved to Barcelona in August 2020 where I worked for 3 months at GreenPowerMonitor as a Product and UX / UI designer.
As the designer for 3 teams of developers, I worked closely with product owners to design the UX, UI and interactions for new product components and features for a market-leading monitoring platform in the renewable energy sector. My key responsibilities included:
- Working with product owners to define user stories
- Requirements gathering from stakeholders
- Creating initial designs through to polished prototypes
- Testing assumptions, articulating design decisions and incorporating feedback into final designs
- Handing over designs to engineers and being the point of contact during implementation phase
- Conducting heuristic reviews of existing components within the platform
Dec 2020 - Nov 2022
Product Designer
I worked for a start-up offering crowd-sourced QA testing. My role here was extremely varied - I was responsible for designing an MVP SaaS platform from scratch, testing and iterating on it until it became a saleable product.
A key part of this role was to design the product to enable efficient workflows but also to create a UI that was simple, uncluttered and appealing to a technical user base. I helped to create our design system based on these principles and completed a full redesign project, which involved talking to people in software teams to understand more about their workflow and context to allow us to create designs that they would find intuitive and engaging.
I worked in a continuous discovery cycle, conducting customer interviews, research and leading solutions exploration and workshops.
Nov 2022 - Present
Product Designer
As the sole product designer I am responsible for the end-to-end design of a carbon-emissions tracking tool. The tool provides users with the ability to analyse their carbon emissions across all areas of their business, from operations to product carbon footprints and delivery of those products.
I have recently worked on the creation of a new feature which allows customers to model the carbon impact of changes across their business, and to set, manage and track targets in line with the Science-based Targets Initiative.
My role is very broad, ranging from discovery to finding usable solutions to complex problems, and relies on effective collaboration with climate scientists and industry experts alongside my team of developers, researchers and product manager.