Barry White, Curriculum Vitae

Joining as a front-end designer on a 3-person team, to becoming design lead for Lives of the First World War (A project done in partnership with Imperial War Museums) and now offering design leadership as a senior designer for our core buiness Findmypast.

Responsible for helping define process, growing the design team and participating in the product delivery through leading workshops, customer interviews and user testing sessions, as well as producing just-enough design in the form of sketches, wireframes or mockups, user flows, styleguides, critiques, UX & UI design. Work tends to be in 1 or 2 week sprints, or ran Kanban-style. I collaborate with a team of developers, product managers, data, marketing and customer service team members.

Highlights:

• Championed component-based, object-oriented Less/HTML and prototyped the first iteration of a living styleguide both design and engineering use.
• Created a visual design language of Sketch components to get consistancy across our product.
• Value proposition research and design across various customer segments thats helping define our product vision and roadmap.
• Developed team best practices (knowledge sharing and critique) as we grow our team.
• Created a solution to gain free, organic traffic that become the 2nd-most (sometimes 1st) valuable source of new customers through running design sprints and using lean development practices.
• Design and build of internal tools for licence management (managing thousands of record sets, licensors and royalties) and customer management software (managing millions of customers and their data) by involving and working along side our finance and customer service team colleagues who would use these tools daily.

Initially a front-end developer, building web apps with a senior front-end dev, but transitioned to lead the design of our core business creating iPhone/iPad apps for ourselves and clients.

Responsible for detailed photoshop mockups, exploratory design, iconography and mentoring two design interns (one of which is now the lead designer for the company).

As part of a small design agency, I was responsible for the UI design, HTML and CSS of Drupal & Wordpress websites. Clients included The St Andrews Hotel and Guest House Association — which includes all of St. Andrews' most famous hotels — Fife Council, and London-based kids party company, Sharky & George.

During my time in college, and while working with IT-Serve, I also freelanced by doing design, HTML and CSS for local clients, such as a 4-5 Star timeshare resort near St. Andrews, a life coach and a popular local grunge band. I also provided regular front-end development services, building static HTML/CSS websites, to a local design agency.