Resumé
This page summarises my cv. For more information on a particular topic, click the link at the foot of a subsection. Download a print-formatted copy in the sidebar.
Work History
Since July 2008 I’ve worked as freelance information architect and usability guy, and am currently at the Foreign and Commonweath Office. I’ve been an IA since 2003, and have worked in new media since 1999.
Skills
As well as great interpersonal skills I have a very clear understanding of good IA process, and have used all the standard IA tools and techniques many times:
- expert review, heuristic evaluation, competitor and gap analysis
- user constituency research, survey authoring, diary studies
- stakeholder research: workshop facilitation, interviewing
- user profiling, persona creation
- content analysis, site mapping, content modelling, taxonomies
- card sorting
- metadata specification
- wireframing (by hand and Visio), HTML prototyping
- usability testing, emotional response testing
- presenting
In addition to billable work, I’ve frequently been involved in new business generation. I’ve worked into the night on pitches, bids and proposals for all kinds of clients, and I’m comfortable presenting in pressure situations.
Further back, my experience as a developer has left me with a solid understanding of web development from the coder’s perspective, as well as pretty good front-end skills:
- HTML + CSS
- DOM scripting / JavaScript
- CMS integration
- Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop
- IIS web server
IA case studies
In the last year I’ve architected projects for the Healthcare Commission, the Central Office of Information, the Royal College of Nursing, and have run several large user profiling exercises for TfL.
HTML portfolio
From 1999 to 2003 I worked as an HTML developer, a skill which I maintain. Notable clients from the dozens of sites I’ve built include the BBC, Barclays Capital, Tesco, and Enterprise Rent-a-Car. I’m a web-standards kind-of guy, and all these sites were fully accessible, semantically structured, search engine friendly, and valid XHTML + CSS-P.
Education
I graduated from University College London in June 1994 with an Astronomy degree. This a highly analytical, physics and maths based discipline, and ‘your love-life next month’ was not a course-unit option.