Way of working
I have never seen a project go wrong because the design was not good enough. It goes wrong earlier, when everyone leaves the same meeting with a different idea of what is being built. Catching that is a large part of my work. So I read the business, the numbers and the current experience first, I talk to the people who have to live with the result, and then I build a quick prototype, so at least everyone is arguing about the same thing.
Three things I keep coming back to.
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One
Team harmony
People do their best work when they feel safe enough to disagree in the room, instead of in the corridor afterwards. I spend real time on this, and you can see it in what a team ships.
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Two
Doing the homework
Before I propose anything I want to know the business, the numbers, and how the current experience treats people. Opinions get cheaper once someone reads the analytics.
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Three
Making it real
A working prototype settles arguments that an hour of talking will not. I build them early with AI, while they are still cheap to throw away, so we can try the real thing months before it is built.
Capabilities
I work between design, strategy and technology
I started in experience design and kept picking up whatever the work needed after that: strategy, business, martech. Here is what I get asked for most.
- Team mentoring
- Digital strategy
- User experience
- Information architecture
- Content strategy
- Interaction design
- Workshop facilitation
- Digital consulting
Questions
What people ask before we start
I read the business, the analytics and the current experience before I propose anything, and I talk to the people who live with it, before anyone opens a design tool. After that it stays one conversation rather than a series of handovers. First a picture of where we are going that the people who have to build it actually agree with, then the design, the structure and the systems to get there.
I sit between design, strategy and technology and get the three to agree. That means turning a business ambition into something people can actually use, bringing product owners and business units around to one customer journey, setting the principles and the design system that keep it consistent, and mentoring the team who carry it after I leave. Day to day it looks like research, workshops, architecture and a lot of prototyping.
Large digital experiences with real complexity behind them: ecommerce and brand storytelling that have to work as one, platforms that personalise without being creepy, design systems that outlive the project, and the strategy work that decides what to build before anything is built. Recent examples run from an adidas B2B commerce platform to a recruitment platform for the US Air Force.
Useful where it takes friction out, or lets an experience adapt to the person in front of it. A distraction where it is bolted on so a brand can say it has some. I judge it the way I judge any other technology: does this make things better for the person using it, and would we be comfortable explaining how it uses their data.
I live in the Amsterdam area and work at Monks in Hilversum, with teams and clients across Europe, the Middle East and the United States. Most of the work in the case studies was done with distributed teams.