I work as Lead Designer at SteelBuy, a digital marketplace for the steel industry. I work closely with clients to understand who their users are and what they are trying to do. I like to challenge business assumptions along the way – my aim is to share research findings with the people I work with as an opportunity to redefine the problems we all think we know about. Once there is an understanding of the problem across the organisation, I roll my sleeves up and create solutions we can prototype and test early, making sure we learn along the way by measuring what we do.
I believe that to innovate you need to design. And for that you need a strong group of people to work together with that goal. My role is about facilitating that to happen. But how?
I don’t jump into solutions
I encourage everyone to take time to map out the problem and agree on an initial target. You need to start a bit slow so you can go fast later.
I co-design
That means the clients I work with help us by designing their own products. Clients have plenty of industry and community knowledge to contribute, but they often aren’t given a structured opportunity to participate. I like to deeply involve them in the conceptual phase so their knowledge is baked in.
I prototype
A common issue with prototyping is that people try to get all the details right before even testing the main idea. If a simple facade is all that is needed to learn quickly and decide the next step then so be it.
I get honest feedback
The main purpose of prototyping is to have something to test with real users. They are the ones that will provide you with actionable feedback. We don’t try guessing and hoping we (or our clients) are right – all the while investing money and months of time into your ideas. Test and learn…
Previous clients
- The National Archives
- Library of Congress
- Getty
- CRU
- NHS
- Met Police
- Census 2011 / ONS
- FSA
- MOJ
- Serco
- Shakespeare Globe
- Honda
- Ericsson
- Yamaha
- Samsung
- Sony
- BT
- Virgin Media
- Etihad
- DMGT
- Go-Ahead
- New York Daily News