OneSignal
Since 2018 I've been leading a multi-disciplinary design org at OneSignal, including product design, visual communications design, & design engineering. You can see what our team has been designing and shipping on Dribbble.
Postdrop
An AI-powered HTML email builder for marketers and developers.
I originally built Postdrop as a playground to experiment with AI workflows and modern product tooling, it evolved into a fully-fledged product. I designed and developed it end-to-end, from UX and frontend to growth.
Now generating recurring revenue and used by thousands of developers and marketers monthly.
Mesosphere (acquired by Nutanix)
Joined Mesosphere in 2015 to lead and scale the Product Design team for DC/OS, an enterprise platform for managing containers, big data, and Kubernetes workloads.
Built and managed a multidisciplinary design team, leading the end-to-end user experience across UI, design systems, CLI, and user research.
Worked closely with Product and Engineering to ship complex infrastructure software for Fortune 500 customers, while embedding design thinking and UX practices across the company.
I wrote about design stack we used, our product design workflow and how I set up our user testing program.
HTML Email Templates
In 2016 I shipped HTML Email, a pack of email templates for developers and startups. This product evolved through a series of MVP blog posts and open source email tools. On launch day it was #1 on Product Hunt, in the first 2 years had more than 900 customers, and traffic of over 10,000 users per month.
As well as email templates the site also includes some useful tools for developers and designers including a CSS inliner and a Sketch design system.
You can read an interview I did with Postmark about how I got the product up and running.
Mailgun (acquired by Rackspace, then Sinch)
Joined Mailgun in 2013 as the first design and product hire, shortly after its acquisition by Rackspace, helping scale an email API for developers used by companies like GitHub, Stripe, and Slack.
Owned the end-to-end user experience across the product, spanning the dashboard, developer docs, website, and brand.
During my time there, the team grew from 10 to 40 people, establishing Mailgun as a high-growth, sustainable business that later spun out from Rackspace and was eventually acquired by Sinch.
Open-source and GitHub
I've long been sharing tips and techniques on web design and development. In recent years I've taken to GitHub to share full projects and resources that I think other designers and developers will find useful.
Working on developer tools like Runnable and Mailgun I've been inspired to open-source a lot of the stuff I work on, enabling others to make use of them but also contribute back or discuss implementation and best practices.
You can find a bunch of my projects on GitHub, a lot of which are related to email design and development.
- Simple responsive email template (14K stars)
- Mailgun transactional email templates (7K stars)
- Grunt email design workflow (3K stars)
- Motherplate - my HTML/SCSS boilerplate
Codeshare
Share code real time with other developers. I made this code sharing tool using Firebase, Node.js and Express (see original HN post). The purpose of this project was to learn Node.js, which my team were using at the time, and it gave me a chance to experiment with the Firebase API and WebRTC. I've since worked with a team to help scale the tool.
Copy/paste and share real-time code snippets with others. If you share the url with a friend they will see your code as you type it. As of 2018 Codeshare has 100,000 active monthly users. Companies use it for sharing code between teams, coducting interviews, and for teaching others how to code.
Flask (acquired)
Create really simple and sharable to do lists with Flask. No sign up. Nothing to download. Just add tasks. A simple productivity tool for getting things done and sharing lists with friends. Featured in LifeHacker here.
Flask is a side project that I designed and developed with Ruby on Rails. It started off as a weekend experiment to learn CoffeeScript. Then I used it as a playground to experiment with new ideas, 3rd-party tools and keep my development skills up to scratch.
I wrote a blog post about how you should always have a side project as an experimental playground.
After a couple of years of user growth I sold Flask to another software company.
Runnable (acquired by Mulesoft)
In 2012 I joined Runnable, based in Palo Alto, becoming a member of the founding team. Runnable enabled developers to run server-side code in the browser. No downloading, nothing to install, no registration, just run code.
My role included product discovery, prototyping, user research, interface design, front-end development, integration with Node.js and Javascript and working closely with the founding engineers.
As an early stage lean startup, I spent a lot of time running experiments, talking to users and making good use of tools like Mixpanel, Optimizely and Qualaroo to help us undertand our user base, validate assumptions and determine the product roadmap, while tackling any design related tasks that needed done.
Runnable later pivoted to a development staging tool for teams then got acquired by MuleSoft (and subsequently Salesforce).
Kareo (now Tebra)
Based in Irvine, Orange County CA, Kareo develop EHR and Practice Management software. I joined as their first design hire, then recruited and managed the UX team, helping them transition from a desktop to web application, and introducing their first iOS app. The company grew from 40 to 200 people during that time.
Daily activities included product discovery, customer research, prototyping, usability tests, coding the user interface, working closely with developers and product managers while managing and recruiting the UX team.
TwitAmore (acquired)
TwitAmore was a side project of mine that went live on Valentine's Day 2012. It's a gimmicky website that tells you who you love on Twitter. I used it as an experiment to improve my Ruby on Rails skills, along with Haml, Sass, using the Twitter API and it was my first project using Heroku as a host.
Due to the tie in with Valentine's Day the site went viral and managed to get on the front page of Mashable, The Next Web and Huffington Post among others. The site received over 1 million unique visitors in 2012.
I later sold TwitAmore to an online dating service.
Lookaly
I started Lookaly while completing a Masters at University of Ulster. You could describe Lookaly as Yelp for Ireland. As one of two Founders I was in charge of many things including design, product, marketing, sales and operations.
The site was well received in Northern Ireland attracting over 40,000 unique visitors per month, and the iPhone app earned a DANI award in 2011 for App of the Year.
Due to increasing competition in this space from the likes of Yelp, Google, Facebook and TripAdvisor we eventually closed Lookaly to focus on other projects.
The Big Word Project
While at University I teamed up with Paddy Donnelly and created a website that let people buy words of the dictionary, priced at $1 per letter, and link them to their website.
It was a viral success. We managed to sell over 7,500 words, with endorsements from the likes of John Gruber, and it led to a feature article in Wired magazine, April 2008.
Over 10 years later the site now lives on as a Wikipedia article.