Selected work.

Before any of it was funded

Two websites, two owners, two scoreboards.

The biggest part of this job came before the business case existed, and none of it was design. Coles ran two separate sites, each owned by a different member of the executive team, each doing well against targets that pulled in opposite directions.

Putting them together meant one of those scoreboards had to change. That is a much harder conversation than anything in the design work that followed.

What that took

Getting two C-suite owners onto one plan.

I spent months working through what a single experience would do for each of them, in front of both executives and their leadership teams. The version that landed had the marketing side feeding demand straight into the shop, and the shop giving marketing a much clearer read on what its content was worth. Neither had to give up the thing they were measured on.

That was the work. Building a shared vision out of two competing strategies, and holding it steady through the months it took to turn into a funded programme.

The remit

One shopping experience.

The re-platform put both sides in one place, so you could browse, get ideas and buy without having to move between them.

Alongside the platform work I led design strategy across Websites, Apps, Liquor, and Fulfilment and Operations, and set the Coles Design System strategy across brands.

The interesting bit

Shoppable recipes.

Recipe content where every ingredient goes straight into the cart, so a page that used to be marketing became somewhere you could actually shop from.

The other half of the job

Building the org that could deliver it.

A relaunch of that size needed a design team that didn't exist yet. I grew the org from 10 people to more than 40 in nine months, then built the operating model that made the growth hold rather than just inflate the headcount.

The challenge

Coles covers an enormous amount of ground, from grocery and health to insurance, mobile, fuel, financial services and marketplace. Each of those lived in its own app or channel. What leadership wanted to know was whether it could all become one thing, and if so, why and how.

I worked hand in hand with the exec suite to pull the vision together, and tied it back to the five year growth plan. That mattered. It meant they could weigh it against everything else on the table instead of filing it under interesting.

The approach

One app for everyday life.

I mapped out the everyday-life categories Coles could either own or partner into, covering Food and Drink, Lifestyle, Travel, Finance, Utility, Games, Social and Transport, then designed three of them end to end so there was something real to look at rather than a diagram.

The integrated journey

Sally's family holiday.

A single journey running end to end through the whole thing. Travel booked through partners, green credits that plant trees on a Coles Forest map, health rewards tied to a wearable, and payments and fuel built in through Scan&Go and Pay-at-Pump.

The outcome

It gave a fairly abstract ambition enough shape that leadership could actually weigh it up.

The remit

A department store, made navigable.

A department store carries an enormous number of categories and brands. Most of the work went into making all of that easier to move through and buy from.

Beyond the screens

The parts that made it repeatable.

Alongside the redesign I ran enterprise customer journey mapping and the Voice of Customer program, and set up continuous research operations so the team stopped guessing between projects.

The remit

Rebuilding the store online.

A rebuild of Target Australia's store experience, with most of the effort going into search, browse, and shortening the path to the right product.

The wider job

Moving UX out of product.

I moved the UX function out of product and into the ecommerce leadership team, so design was in the room when the trading decisions were made. From there I led two strategic transformation areas that reported into monthly board meetings.

I widened the function's scope to cover the mobile app and the store delivery teams, and led mobile app and omni-channel experience strategy across both.

My role

Sole designer, end to end.

I owned research, UX and visual design as the only designer on the project, working closely with engineering on the build and with product on strategy.

Why this mattered

Around 60% of all SEEK traffic was already on mobile, but applying still finished on desktop. You could browse jobs in the app and then had to go somewhere else to do anything about it.

Applications are what the whole marketplace runs on, so that gap cost SEEK money every day it stayed open.

Where we started

The original app.

The strategic bet

The bet, and two threads of work.

If candidates could build and tailor their profile, CV and cover letter on their phone, they'd apply where they already were, and SEEK would stop losing those applications to desktop.

How I approached it

Research first.

Research in the room

Synthesis and card sorting.

From research to principles

What the research told us.

The messy middle

Exploring the structure.

Working through navigation, the most common paths, and what to cut.

From card sort to structure

A simpler information architecture.

Profile sits at the centre of it. It's the 'me' hub people asked for, and it's also what feeds the recommendations.

Conversion by design

Search that gets people further.

Personalisation

A home that knows you.

The centrepiece

The apply flow.

Concept to delivery

Shipping it.

The payoff

What it did.

What's next

Where I'd push further.

I'd take the profile further into a proper preference engine. Capture richer signals like salary, role type, location and how someone wants to work, then feed those straight into the recommendation and search algorithms so the profile actually shapes what each candidate sees.

The problem

Fine until you want to know something.

A worker wrote their start and finish times on a paper card, the card went up to the office, and someone typed the lot into a spreadsheet. It worked the way paper always works, which is fine until you want to know something. How many hours are on that job so far? Which builds are running over? Who's still clocked on? The honest answer to any of those was give me until end of day.

The floor was never the problem. The floor was very good at building trailers. The problem was that everything those people did turned into a pile of paper that only became useful after someone had re-typed it a day later into a sheet nobody entirely trusted.

How I took it on

Fixed price, tight scope.

I'd rather agree exactly what finished looks like up front than sell someone an open-ended project and a monthly invoice. Four weeks isn't long, but it's enough if you're strict about what goes in.

What I built

Two halves, one system.

The first sits on the workshop wall. Tablets, mounted where people already walk past. You tap your name, tap in a short PIN, pick the job and the task you were on, enter your hours, and walk off. No accounts to remember, no app to install, no fiddly typing.

The office half

A screen that's just current.

The moment someone logs time on the floor, the office can see it. Hours against each job, which builds are tracking over their estimate, who's clocked on today, where every job sits against the hours it was quoted at. The spreadsheet and its day of delay became a screen that's just current.

The commercial point

Quoted hours, watched in real time.

A fixed-price trailer build either lands inside its quoted hours or it doesn't, and until now they found out which at month end, when it was too late to do anything. A task running hot now shows up the day it starts running hot.

Where the real work went

Things that don't demo well.

Writing software that saves a time entry is easy. Writing software that a person in a loud workshop, wearing gloves, at the end of a long shift, will actually use every day without being nagged about it is a different job entirely.

After go-live

Where it actually got good.

The four weeks got us to a working system, which is the start rather than the finish. The most useful stretch came once real people were using it in the real building.

None of that was in the original scope and all of it mattered. Scoping tightly doesn't stop things changing. What it does is keep the first version small enough that you reach the real feedback quickly.

The outcome

The quieter win is trust.

The obvious win is that the paper is gone and the office has a live picture instead of a day-old one. The quieter win is that the numbers are current, so people believe them, so they get used to make decisions instead of sitting in a drawer.

There's no AI in this build and nobody on the floor asked for any. It's a well-made tool for a specific job, and that turns out to be the whole point.