How I work, and what I’ve been building

I’m a product designer in Chester. Most of what I’ve worked on has the same shape: a catalogue with too many options, a customer who can’t hold it all in their head, and a business that needs them to choose. Holiday parcs across nine countries. Video on demand on a set-top box with no keyboard. Energy tariffs. Utilities switching.

Research first, and the instrument before the answer

The part of the job I care most about is the bit before the design: deciding what would actually count as evidence, and building something that produces it.

That shows up in a preference study written so that the person who designed one of the two options couldn’t bias it — and a documented reversal when the first bias audit found a leading question I’d written myself. It shows up in an eleven-probe adversarial script for an AI advisor, where every probe carries a written expected behaviour, so a run produces a verdict rather than an impression. And it shows up in a rollout gated on conversion rather than on a date, because a launch you can’t reverse isn’t a test.

I build the tooling around my own process

This is the part I’d most want to talk about, and it’s the least standard thing on this site.

Most designers in 2026 are using AI tools. I’ve been building agent skills around my own practice — a competitor research suite that runs a structured study across a set of sites and returns a scorecard or a written report; a handoff generator that emits a developer spec, a separate acceptance-criteria file for Jira, a tracking and analytics spec, and an internationalisation workbook; a research playback builder; and an automation that reads pitch numbers off a warped campsite plan and places verified markers across an entire parc.

On the AI advisor, that instinct produced the thing I’m proudest of on the project: when it became clear nobody internally had capacity to use a conversational product hard enough to break it, I proposed an automated persona-driven testing suite — the usual family cases, plus a nagging user and one who has to bring the dog.

Where I’m honest about the limits

I don’t write production code. On the AI advisor the agency owned every line of it, and I’ve said so on the case study rather than letting the work imply otherwise. On the replatform I held a product-owner gap without the title, and lost at least one argument I still think I was right about.

A small role described accurately is worth more than a large one described vaguely — and it survives the interview, which the other kind doesn’t.

The portfolio itself

Ten years of my work lived in Adobe XD, which Adobe discontinued. Getting it out is why this site exists, and it’s why the site is hand-written static HTML with no framework, no build step, no CDN, no JavaScript and no webfont request. One file, opens anywhere, and will still open in ten years. Having been burned by one vendor, taking a dependency on the next one seemed like the wrong lesson to draw.