From Target's Chewing Gum Aisle to Preventing a £135m Loss at Next
Twenty years across retail, ecommerce, fintech, insurtech, healthcare, and air travel, from hypergrowth startups to FTSE100s. I find what the data alone can't explain, challenge assumptions with evidence, and don't stop until the research drives the decision.
When I was 20, on a family holiday in Florida, all I wanted was to raid the chewing gum aisle at SuperTarget. What grabbed me wasn't the gum. It was the store's racetrack layout, guiding shoppers effortlessly without a single sign. My first lesson in UX: when you understand how people behave, the design decisions make themselves.
I've worked across retail, ecommerce, fintech, insurtech, healthcare, and air travel, from hypergrowth startups to FTSE100s. At Next, I prevented £135m in losses by proving the burger menu trend would cost the business a 9.1% sales drop. I traced a 51% suit return rate back to a single navigation gap, cutting returns to 36% and driving 37% more category engagement within a week. At Lovey and By Miles, I built research functions from scratch, in one case before anyone asked me to.
I use AI actively across synthesis, insight generation, and workflow automation, delivering an estimated 20% efficiency gain while knowing exactly where it falls short and applying human judgment accordingly. I've worked fully remote since 2020. I turn complex findings into plain English stories that make companies actually change their minds.
I shadowed endoscopy technicians in hospital scrub rooms to understand workflows no brief could fully describe. I ran 70+ competitor analyses before designing the navigation that prevented £135m in losses at Next. I spent a week on the Boots shop floor during peak Christmas trading because the data alone never tells the whole story. As a parent of three neurodivergent children, I think about inclusion as an everyday responsibility, not a checkbox.
UX research has been the core of my practice for my entire career, long before product design became its own discipline. Even when the role said designer, the work was mostly research and discovery, with UI design always a distant third. It took seeing what happens when companies make big commercial calls without research behind them to make me walk away from the UI work for good. The titles haven't always told the whole story. The work has.
Innovate, don't imitate.
The case studies show the work in detail.
