About

Career timeline displaying the various roles I have had from 1999 to 2021.Multimedia, Senior, Lead Web, Service, Head, Freelance Designer.

Career Summary

20 years experience of creating digital products. I am happiest creating and inspiring others to make great digital experiences that delight users. 

I am have to delivered projects individually or collaboratively. I have managed teams that have successfully created great user experiences from single products to large and complex services. 

Working in a wide range of corporate environments has shown me the value of honest, trustworthy working practices. Which I believe allows me to develop and deliver wonderful designs.

I currently work as a freelance designer under the company name of Charlie MYK Ltd. If you have a project you think I can help you with please send me an e-mail, charliefrancis@chrlie.co.uk.

Invesco EMEA

Freelance UX designer – Aug 2020 – September 2021

Creating the MVP for Invesco Basecamp, a web app for their Model Portfolio Service.  

  • Delivering user flows, high fidelity mock ups, and detailed designs.
  • Fed into an agile development process  to launch in a record timescale for Invesco.
  • Conducted guerrilla user testing with internal sales team to see if the app met the users needs for the product.

Standardising the Invesco EMEA ‘s website,  during the migration of content across CMS systems, and a brand modernisation process.

  • Reviewing existing content and layouts, in order to re-align the experience with Invesco’s current B2B lead generation process
  • Creation of a coherent information architecture, from site maps, navigation, to consistent page layouts
  • Review of the Adobe AEM content creation process to improve the internal experience for the content publishing teams.

CNN

Freelance UX designer – Sept 2018 – Oct 2019

Working in the Shared Web Capabilities team in London to deliver products for CNN.

  • Helped deliver the initial framework and concepts for a Design system.
  • Championed accessibility standards.
  • Advocated a research led approach to product development.

Energized Work

Designer – August 2015 – June 2018

Developing a playbook for integrating design into an existing lean, agile and extreme software delivery team. Building an end to end process that maximises value and minimises waste. 

Ernst & Young LLP

Travel Risk and Compliance

  • Facilitate experience mapping workshop with senior stakeholders to construct a customer map for the service. 
  • Contribute to the product strategy through competitor analysis, considering market, consumer and technological factors.
  • Conceptualise, explore, present and communicate design concepts to the internal team  and clients, for example a dashboard idea.

Pottermore

  • Initiated a service design approach to understanding the ‘Potterverse’. Helping fans achieving their goals and meet their needs in the redesigned site.
  • Conducted guerrilla user testing on the redesign, we could then prioritise fixing some of the pain points.
  • Proposing concepts for exploring the narrative structure of the Wizarding World.

Barclays UK Retail and Business Bank

Head of UX Customer Experience – March 2013 – March 2015

I recruited, built and led the UX team at Barclays.co.uk. I created a culture that was professional but informal, and allowed the designers the autonomy to create great designs. The idea was to have highly creative people who have a passionate love of what they do, combined with the endless patience that helps them achieve it. 

  • Grew the team from 4 to 12 designers and we worked on up to 50 projects a year. 
  • Transforming complex retail banking financial products and turned them into simple, elegant user experiences. 
  • Innovate within the department’s product development plan, to continuously improve the products, and evolve the user experience.

Seren

Principle Consultant – UX – November 2010 – March 2013 

I joined Seren to learn about service design. I lead the visual design team inspiring them to think creatively to produce new ideas and concepts based on the evidence of our service design process. Our clients included Orange, O2, Vodafone, Barclays, FT and ITV.

  • Managed an 8 week rapid discovery process to design Vodafone M2M portal. From detailed workshops with key stakeholders to producing visual design templates that described the products look and feel.
  • Conducted Research and Product Design for ITV’s Video on Demand service for the Canvas platform. Turning our learnings into design opportunities, creating concepts, design principles to develop innovative service ideas.
  • Organize the application icons for Vodafone Business services. Auditing and editing the existing icon set and developing a framework and guide for creating new icons.

IPC Media

Lead Web Designer – July 2007 – Dec 2009

Lead Web Designer at IPC Media reporting to Andy Cowles. A new role within IPC magazines bringing improvements to the online editions of their mass market magazines. 

  • Championing an agile approach to digital product delivery
  • Redesigning Now magazine, goodtoknow, and TV Chat.
  • Explaining and advocating digital best practices to create better digital production processes.

AOL

Senior Designer – August 1999 – July 2007

  • Developed the European Homepage proposition. I collaborated with the design team in France, Germany and UK. The EU portal team also worked on the development of AOL EU New Geographies project, which involved launching AOL portals into new European countries.
  • Responsible for redesigning AOL UK portal. Led the design of ‘Project Trinity’, managing the designers and processes, working with the editorial team and developers to deliver a web standards based design in six months.
  • Designed from scratch a Welcome screen CMS. The ‘Restart’ tool recovered its development costs from the increased ad sales within its first year, described as the ‘million pound homepage’.

OCC – Oxford Clinical Communications

Multimedia Designer – January 1997 – July 1999

Producing medical CD Roms for the pharmaceutical industry. The company also created CD Roms for exhibitions and publicity purposes. As the industry became more aware of the possibilities of the internet, we moved into the production of web sites.

Education

Central St Martins College of Art and Design 1994 – 1996

Post Grad Diploma Multimedia

Kingston University 1991 – 1994

2.1 Fine Art