M-C DEAN

Experience Designer / Yoga Teacher

Manly, nsw Australia

I'm a product designer with a passion for user centered design. I am also an advocate of creative thinking approaches and design thinking.

I specialize in experience design for software. I've worked on lots of websites, web applications, mobile and social media products, applying principles and techniques from psychology and social sciences, human factors, human-computer interaction, visual design, accessibility and usability. My Ph.D focused on natural language generation and human communication with machines, a combination of AI and HCI.

I have a strong drive for innovation and have designed, envisioned and created new products for different market places and industries from scratch, as well as the strategy for bringing them to market and gaining user adoption. I bring the power and energy of design thinking to both startups and big companies. I like to focus my efforts on large-scale industry disruption.

I love to draw, take photos and skateboard. I'm a student and teacher of Yoga. I'm always exploring new things.

I've worked for a bunch of companies and projects in the last 10 years. I have come to particularly specialise in bringing experience design to Agile and Lean teams. I've coached teams to change to be faster and more effective, and continue to enjoy working in a fast-paced collaborative way. I lead teams and am not afraid of getting my hands dirty and making decisions.

If you want to see examples of my deliverables, process, sketching, wireframes and so forth, drop me a line and I'll share those with you. In the meantime, here's a recap of what I've done. I've lived and worked in Europe, San Francisco, and Sydney.

 

I'm the cross-product design lead. I work closely with the product managers and developers of Atlassian products. I have ongoing responsibility for driving the design vision, for establishing frameworks to make design thinking and lean UX a reality. I'm at the front of the line on engaging and studying our users and helping to design and validate user interfaces.

 

Lead experience design consultant role including service design, UI design, information architecture, behavioural analytics, usability testing, design thinking, sketching and human factors, all in an Agile development environment and sometimes in a really really Lean one. I was a strong and active supporter of Design Thinking at this company.

 

I was an experience designer and a strategist. I brought in an Agile way of working withint the agency, and also introduced user centered design and some design thinking methods withint the creative and dev teams.

 

I delivered a new strategy for the website and a fresh new approach to presenting themselves online. I also worked as a strategist and experience designer for this company and worked on a number of medical customer accounts.

 

I worked with a large distributed Agile team to deliver a customer facing online service. There was a substantial user research and user testing element to this work. 

 

I helped formulate and create various Nestle websites and digital endeavours of which a kids swimming community. I worked on a few cereal websites and apps.

 
 
 

I worked with the dev and creative team to bring together a website for lego which would showcase their products and allow children to share with family the toys that were on their Christmas list.

 

I worked with GetUp on a community website involving lots of social interactions  and also worked on their own website as well. 

 

RapidFTR is a mobile application that helps aid workers collect, sort and share information about children in emergency situations. I worked on the mobile version of this app while at ThoughtWorks.

 

I worked in a distributed Agile team to deliver various pieces of work for this Australian finance company. 

 

This was my first "proper" job and I learnt a great deal during my 4 years at Aviva. Aviva is the largest insurer in Europe and I had the chance to have a number of roles there. I started out as an SEO strategist because I knew a lot about search engines and then I moved to analytics and later to R&D where I made new apps.

 

I was a student at UEA for my BA in languages and linguistics, my Masters in computer science and then my Ph.D in computer science (AI & HCI). I was also a lecturer and worked on a number of research projects. 

 
 

Michael Hill is a well-known Jeweller in Australia. I designed the platform and also crafted the strategy for a worldwide online game which was run over the course of 6 weeks. Kim Kardashian and other celebrities were involved in the event and all of the deadlines were non-moveable. We worked very Lean and delivered a very successful event.