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Research and design techniques to solve
valuable business problems
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What you’ll get from my services
- Insights from your business and users, to arm you with knowledge to make decisions and remove the need for guesswork
- Someone who will uncover complex requirements and ensure they’re delivered on
- Holistic solutions that appreciate and involve relevant areas of your business
- Expertise in guiding a project end-to-end from uncertain origins to a clear validated solution
- Confidence that you’re using valuable developer time building the right thing
- Delivery of quick, tactical value as well as long term strategic objectives
- ‘Team-glue’ - bringing together product, development and design teams around a problem and it’s solution
“I ensure that complex projects go in the right direction, to a valuable outcome.
I do this using research and design processes to explore business problems. Then realise and validate ideas so that development effort is confidently spent on the right solution.”
How I’ll do that
I apply a number of methodologies and activities when designing.
They broadly fit into 2 approaches: innovation supported predominantly by qualitative research and experimentation supported predominantly by quantitative research.
Research
- Business research to explore goals, objective and requirements
- Qualitative and quantitative user research
- Defining user problems
- Validating decisions, whether at early concept stages or beta testing
Design
- Rapid concepting and prototyping
- High fidelity designs
- Detailed specification for handover
- Supporting agile delivery teams to ensure specifications are delivered on
Process
- Fast and lean: design, test and learn via rapid prototyping or live experiments
- Measurement of experiments and releases against key UX metrics
- Team collaboration and ideation around problem statements
- Remote, in-person and global methodologies
Clients I've worked with
Why choose me?
- I’m an experienced generalist and handle any aspect of the research and design process
- I’m meticulous and detail oriented, leaving no corner unaccounted for
- I love solving for complex projects… and bringing teams along on that journey
- I get up to speed with new domains and businesses quickly
- I can work fast and create quick feedback loops. Getting ahead of project teams so that decisions are agreed on ahead of time
- I love what I do and bring energy and enthusiasm to the teams I work with. I build relationships with everyone from directors to developers to ensure we’re executing the right solution
“Ben transformed our work at BuzzSumo. The excitement, sense of purpose and bottom-line beautiful designs Ben brought to our team left a permanent impact. Take every chance you can get to work with him.”
Nate Walton - Product Director
Ways we can work together
I work remotely, hybrid, in-person and global
On a per-project basis
- End-to-end from inception to delivery
- Discovery to definition: Uncovering problems and ideating solutions
- Ideation to delivery: Generating, validating then delivering solutions
An addition to your team as a designer and/or researcher
- Slotting into your team as a lead/senior
- Providing research and design process where required
- Working on anything from strategic discovery projects to experimentation to regular Agile sprints
As a research consultant, exploring complex problem spaces to support strategic decision making
- Planning and undertaking business and user research
- Presenting findings and facilitating strategy sessions with senior stakeholders
Where I flourish
- Where I can access stakeholders and users to uncover business goals and user needs
- Where I’m entrusted to apply my initiative: arranging workshops, research sessions or any activities that are required to make progress
- Brave companies who are keen to experiment and learn
- …and have metrics set up so we can measure the above
- Where the pace is ‘active’… rather than slow bureaucratic environments
Case studies
Brandwatch
Applying research & design processes to a SaaS data science team and their AI models
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BuzzSumo
Growth design & experimentation to reduce churn in a flourishing start-up
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Into Global
Introducing a user-centred design process to an international student recruitment business
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EDF Innovation Lab
Innovating for electric vehicle charging whilst exploring Blockchain technology
Read case study