About
My name is Emily & I am a designer who specialises in user experience.
I have 6 years experience working in digital, as a designer. This has included both agency and also in-house. I’ve created apps for a range of businesses, redesigned three bank websites and led the UX for children’s games and apps at the BBC. With every project, I am always thoughtful in my approach, showing consideration and understanding for the needs of people.
I studied Graphic Design at Central St Martins in London, where I specialised in interaction design. It was here where I began my fascination with how people interact with design, from how they use a book to how they use a website. Both forms of interaction taught the need for products to be communicated and understood effectively by their users. Constant discovery and learning more about people is what I enjoy the most about now working as a user experience designer.
Throughout my career, I have also focused on developing my soft skills, including wellbeing resilience, presenting and leadership. I am now a Mental Health First Aider and recently completed the BBC's Women into Leadership programme.
I’m passionate about designing solutions that work for people and also helping teams learn about how they can be more effective, collaborative and user-centric.
Where I've worked
cinch (July 2021 - September 2022)
Service Designer
At cinch, I led the Service Design on multiple pieces of work, including the discovery of the current cinch fulfilment service to ensure convenience and excellence for customers who have purchased their car online. I also led the discovery of vehicle inventory operations to improve efficiencies and increase margin across the business.
Department for Work and Pensions (2020 - 2021)
Senior Service Designer
When working at Department for Work & Pensions, I led work exploring the end to end journey of the Job Seeker’s Allowance service. Through regular user research analysis and service blueprinting, I helped discover key areas of opportunity, designed improved experiences and priorotised items based on value to be delivered. Working on the service during the coronavirus pandemic, shed light on changing user needs and so it was essential that I delivered user insights across the full service to help citizen's get the support they needed whilst looking for work.
One Million Mentors (2019 - Present)
Mentor
1MM’s aim is to ensure that every young person in the country has access to a trained mentor as they transition into adulthood. Since becoming a part of 1MM, I have mentored graphic design students, focusing on helping each mentee get ready for industry, building their confidence and also empowering them to be themselves. Working with my mentees has also taught me a lot about the gap between education and industry and the struggles many students face. With them, I aim to understand this problem more and collaborate on soultions that can help all students bridge the gap between learning their trade and making a living from it.
TalkTalk (2019 - 2020)
User Experience Designer
Whilst at TalkTalk, I took a more senior approach to leading UX within scrum teams, but also within the team of UX designers. I led the UX across two teams, including the app and the new sales site. My responsibilities were to discover customers needs, design and test ideas and to deliver human-centred solutions to delivery teams, ultimately bringing the customer into every decision, so their needs are continuously met.
BBC (2017 - 2019)
User Experience Designer
Whilst working at the BBC, I worked within the Children’s Apps and Games teams on numerous projects. Within each project I was the UX lead, ensuring the products were meeting the needs of the users. I did this through organising and facilitating user research, encouraging stakeholders to prioritise user feedback within product strategy and always pushing for excellent experiences.
The Co-operative Bank (2015 - 2017)
User Experience Designer
During my time at The Co-operative Bank, I was actively involved in large scale projects including two website redesigns, various campaigns and online applications. With the banks strong values and ethics, there was a great sense of achievement when I helped the UX team earn the Loving Your Customer Award at the UK Financial Experience Awards for the redesign of the banks public site website.
Desap (2015)
Junior UX Designer
The Hut Group (2014)
Junior Designer
Awards
Loving Your Customer - The UK Financial Experience Awards 2016
Awarded for the collaborative redesign project of The Co-operative Bank public site.
Commended for Design for the O2 Academy Glasgow - Talenthouse
A wall design piece for the O2 Glasgow venue was shortlisted.Extra training
The Hilda Matheson Programme - Women into Leadership
Whilst at the BBC, I was selected for the 'Hilda Matheson Programme', which was focused towards helping and empowering women in the workplace to achieve their career goals, I am now and active member of the this community.
Mental Health First Aider
I am a trained Mental Health First Aider and since being qualified have supported staff through a variety of situations in the workplace. I consistently look for opportunities to educate businesses on the topic of mental wellbeing.Testimonials
"Big shout out for Emily for giving a fab presentation yesterday at our team away day on team wellbeing - a really important subject, and she did it brilliantly."
TalkTalk colleague
"A big thank you to Emily for running the ideation session with the MyTalkTalk App squad. A creative session which has resulted in some great ideas of how we can help customers using the app."
TalkTalk colleague
"Thank you so much for all your hard work on this (BBC Nightfall game), you played a MASSIVE role making the game what it is today. You’ll notice we have tried to implement as many of your recommended changes as we could and I really hope you like where it is today. It has tested extremely well with the audience and as with any product it will continue to evolve. All your hard work was massively appreciated and not forgotten."
BBC Colleague
"I find you (Emily) a really inspiring person to sit next to. You take the time to look into design trends, follow up on reading from talks and link together information with other things you have seen / heard. You take initiative when something isn’t working too well - eg. Organising the weekly team meetings for ChApps team. You always give other members of the team (me) time to help out with what I am working on"
BBC Colleague
"Emily has been out meeting our audiences back to back, testing Go Explore games and reporting back to the wider team. She’s spotted lots of design challenges and worked with agencies to find creative ways to address these."
BBC Colleague
My thoughts
A collection of articles I've written on various topics
