Design Manager of a11y Design Team within Atlassian Design System. Working towards making our products for all, while enabling our makers, customers, and partners to create accessible experiences for all.

As a committee member of UX Camp, I aim to support our teams and volunteers involved in all of our UX Camp events and initiatives across Australia.

As the former Senior Experience Design Manager, I played a key role in leading our Experience Design team to collaborate and deliver continuous work for various internal stakeholders across the RAC. While RAC worked towards continuously creating world-class experiences for our members, our Experience Design team played a critical part in achieving those goals.During my time at RAC, I led the delivery of establishing our RAC Design system 'Sunrise' (www.rac.design). It was developed with our internal end-users in mind, creating an ecosystem that worked effectively for our teams. Additionally, we established other key design foundations, such as the first research repository using Dovetail and the use of UserTesting.com to involve our members in the design process. We also successfully delivered several new digital products and services for our membership base of 1.2 million Western Australians.Within the design community at RAC, my passion was bringing people together. One of my key goals since starting was the establishment of our design community Guild across the business. This provided an environment to foster connections among like-minded creators from various disciplines across the organization.

As the UX leadership role when joining RAC in their Digital team my initial focus was understanding our internal stakeholders' goals for creating ideal member experiences and how our team can help support these initiatives. Another focus was establishing a DesignOps culture in how our UX Design function operates within the business. This involved reviewing current processes, toolset, UX practices, frameworks, providing leadership, identifying skill gaps, and evolving the operating model within the team, to allow for an improvement in delivery and structuring the team for scalability to the increasing business needs. Leading various teams of Designers in the business I have developed a design strategy for scale, allowing teams to focus on HCD practices and work within agile and lean delivery methods. A key delivery has been the creation of a unified Design System across all areas of the business. Involving a large discovery phase our team understood the key problems and ideal ways of working for delivery teams within the business, from this discovery phase we were able to quickly roll into delivery mode establishing and building out the foundations. As a leader during this time, we were also tasked with the global challenge of shifting a workforce to be completely remote, to now a hybrid working model. There were a number of challenges however with strong direction for the team they were able to adjust to a successful operating model without any loss in productivity.

Over time my role grew to become Lead UX/UI Designer for AFG, I took on more of a formal management position and I was the lead experience designer all on projects, working with our strong UI team to create strong digital products, and focus on overall brand development. I found myself to be a key resource between our industry-leading Marketing and IT departments, with my main focus being on the suite of tools we develop for mortgage and finance brokers across Australia and their customers. My experience with a design and development background allowed me to assist with the innovation and transformation of new ventures for the business. Some examples of this included in-depth discovery and research, involving stakeholders and end-users, across a 12-month process with an aim to define the future direction of our key CRM platform for the business and AFG's thousands of mortgage brokers. While establishing our Design System for our products, I was also responsible for the management of our internal design team in a DesignOps role, our design team operated in a distributed model with designers embedded directly within cross-functional teams and product delivery teams in the business. A key part of my role was also about the promotion and adoption of the products and services we delivered to our mortgage broker customers. This involved numerous regular roadshows delivering presentations at industry roadshow conferences around Australia on a regular basis. Besides design, while at AFG I have been involved in a mental health initiative promoting the importance in creating a healthy work life balance and changing the views and stigma associated to those seeking support.

My role in AFG began to expand into a wider space in a Digital Creative and team lead capacity. This role allowed our design function to grow, allowing me to take on a leadership capacity for a growing design team within our Marketing team. The design team is responsible for all branding, digital design, website updates, working with internal stakeholders, and working with our developers to support a range of digital products we supplied to our thousands of mortgage brokers across Australia and their customers.Key highlights in this role were working as a product design team on developing a multi-time industry-winning Marketing automation platform, SMART, and building out a custom iPad app allowing Mortgage Brokers to complete an end-to-end application (including document collection, product selection, and signatures) with a customer in a single meeting.

Starting a single designer within the internal Marketing team at AFG, I was responsible for all branding, design, website updates, working with internal stakeholders and working with our developers to support a range of digital products we supplied to our thousands of mortgage brokers across Australia and their customers.

Part of a small globally based team, I was involved in assisting with the promotion of the Grammy Award-winning band, The Smashing Pumpkins, via the website and social media channels. Initially hired to work on an archival project to assist with the cataloguing of the history of the band's work from 1987 to 2008 my involvement slowly expanded into helping with documenting tours and recording updates from the band via their website and social media.Key activities involved working directly with band members and their record company, Warner Music. During 2008 our team worked on establishing the social media presence for the Smashing Pumpkins and individual accounts for members. As these social media networks were still in their infancy we were able to take advantage of helping grow the fanbase on these networks from the ground up, these are still the networks the band use today. Besides online updates, I was fortunate enough to be part of the touring group on Australian and New Zealand tours between 2008 and 2012, touring on 3 separate tours, and being part of 24 dates around Australia and New Zealand. On these various tours, my role was to document daily updates, share concert photography/video assets and live stream short parts of the concerts. As a lifelong fan of the Smashing Pumpkins from my formative years, this was a time in my life I look fondly on and feel extremely privileged to have been a part of it.

At Webfirm I worked with team members and clients from across the country, based in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. My role was part of a UI design, animation, video production and front-end web development team, focusing on the delivery of complex web solutions using Wordpress.I worked across a cross-functional team and my role involved; working directly with stakeholders for requirement gathering, wireframes, mapping out user-flows, creating designs, presenting designs to stakeholders for approval, turning digital designs into HTML/CSS frameworks, handing over to developers to connect with our various CMS solutions.

As a lead graphic designer within Vivid Group my work was part of a UI design and front-end web development team, focusing on the delivery of complex web solutions using either a custom CMS or Microsoft Sharepoint. I worked across a cross-functional team and my role involved; working directly with stakeholders for requirement gathering, wireframes, mapping out user-flows, creating designs, presenting designs to stakeholders for approval, turning digital designs into HTML/CSS frameworks, handing over to developers to connect with our various CMS solutions. As a leader within the team I also took on the role of providing mentoring to junior designer team members. Clients included: The West Australian Newspaper, Betts Group, Rio Tinto, Audi Australia, West Coast Eagles and more.

Graphic designer and front-end web developer position with a small delivery team. I helped define client business goals, managed client expectations and worked collaboratively with the development team members. As a small self-functioning team I was also required to provide regular updates to our leadership team around deadlines and timelines. Projects ranged from corporate websites, e-commerce solutions, corporate identity branding to retail shop fit-out design.Clients included: Perth Wildcats, Ace/Grand Cinemas, Messages On Hold and more.

Working as an internal graphic designer within the Marketing department, I completed a number of major design projects from brochure work, website development and product design.