About

About me:

I’m a user centred product person, that loves to make websites more effective and easier to use. I care deeply about both the tasks that people are trying to do as well as the contexts they are trying to do them in. I believe that content is more important than tech.

Discovery work is my happy place, and I relish running depth interviews. My background is working as a UX consultant, where I did discovery work, sharing insights, information architecture, content modelling, usability testing, concepts, wireframes and prototyping.

My area of particular strength is taking research outputs and finding insights. Then prioritising and exploring ways to share them in ways that stakeholders and wider teams can understand and action.

I enjoy working in agile teams, where we can use an agile mindset, rather than a dogmatic regime. Creating and maintaining a flow of work and a happy, engaged and independent team is very important to me.

Communication of people’s needs is my biggest area of interest. How we can hope to build products and services that meet people’s needs if they’re not truly understood? I’ve dedicated most of my career to this form of communication, and have a never-ending hunt for the best mechanisms to relay understanding.

The context people are in drives as much of their behaviour as their needs do. I believe good experiences can be created when we understand the truth of people’s situations, circumstances and prior experience, alongside needs and tasks they’re doing. For me offsite experience matters, and good SEO really is good UX.

Using comics, storyboards, sequential art (or simply just words and pictures combined) is something that I have championed for over ten years now and I have a body of talks, workshops and presentations I have made on how to use them in UX practice. I continue to use comics in my practice both inside and outside work.

I work at Torchbox, a digital agency that does tech for good. Its a BCorp, employee owned and exclusively works with charities, not for profits and civil service organisations.

I’m one of many women who are going through a personal neurodivergent discovery, after a lifetime of not understanding quite why I don’t fit in or why I seem to think differently to others. I’m in a diagnosis pathway for both autism and ADHD (AuDHD). It makes sense to me now why I excel at people centric research, as observing people to better understand them is one of my skills I have practiced heavily my whole life.

Outside of work I follow my special interests which shift between different crafts, side projects and research activities. Drawing is a constant though, and I have been exploring a freer, more personal and open practice in the form of a diary like comic sketchbook for the past year or two. My probable ADHD means I have a constant stream of interests to pursue and I’d say learning and making is the thing that excites me and makes me stay up late more than anything else (that and collecting vintage fabric…).

I have a brilliant, funny and charming daughter, and an equally patient, funny, and excellent husband who I live with in Bristol.