Senior UX & Product Designer — Research to rollout, for enterprise platforms and startups.

North Yorkshire, UK · eldonpickles@gmail.com · LinkedIn · eldonpickles.com

I design for complex systems. Ten years in — across global corporates and early-stage startups — I've found I do my best work turning messy problems into systems teams can actually use. Human-centred design is how I get there: research that earns its keep, product and service design that connects ideation to delivery, and the operating models that make it stick.

What I do

Design craft — Product & service design, UX/UI, design systems, prototyping and validation

Research — Discovery, user research, workshop facilitation, insight-to-opportunity mapping

Systems & ways of working — DesignOps, design process development, sprint and workflow design, mindset change

Business — Service design and business transformation, efficiency and improvement strategy, go-to-market, client engagement, stakeholder management, business development, mentorship

Experience

Senior Product Designer — dunnhumby

April 2025 – Present · Price & Promotions

dunnhumby's Price & Promotions platforms — DHPrice, DHPromo and Promo Analytics — are how retail category managers plan, price and evaluate promotions. My work runs across the current Promo product and its migration onto APRIE, the next-generation analytics platform.

• Helped buying teams catch pricing problems before a promotion goes live. Designed the workspace (AutoTPR and Scenario Modelling) where a planner tests a promotion against the retailer's own pricing rules — margin floors, rounding, how often an item can go on offer, how the price sits against competitors — and sees which products break which rule, why, and what fixing it would cost them. Along the way I found a flaw in how the system classified weeks when a product wasn't on promotion, and had it corrected before development started.
• Made working prototypes the norm before anything gets built. Rather than static screens, I build testable versions carrying real journeys, real system responses and realistic data, so people can judge the decision instead of imagining it. One example: a forecasting panel on the plan summary page that separates two kinds of promotional funding people had been conflating — product and client-facing leads confirmed the direction in a single session.
• Gave category managers a way to answer their own questions. Designed Standalone Insights, a self-contained dashboard where someone sets their own criteria — category, region, date range — and reads the answer back, starting with how promotions performed. Building the finished dashboard first and adding the query controls afterwards saved the team around half a sprint and supported them with tangible artefacts at trade planning.
• Turned a platform migration from guesswork into a plan. Compared every interface component in the old product against its equivalent in the new design system, then wrote up what matched, what was missing and where the same gap recurred. Three teams now use that register to estimate and sequence the migration. It also showed that roughly 42% of the gaps were third-party pieces — charting and table libraries rather than in-house work — which changed how the effort was scoped.
• Fixed usability at journey level instead of screen by screen. Mapped the end-to-end routes people actually take through the promotions platform, giving the redesign a structural basis rather than a page-by-page patch. Findings from workshops with client-facing leads became a ranked list of fixes weighted by severity, so research now feeds the roadmap instead of stopping at a report.
• Put lasting habits in place, not one-off improvements. Every major live incident now gets a UX review, logged so repeat problems become visible. Usability reviews run monthly with the people closest to clients, and raises the maturity of our DesignOps. A shared checklist — the Design Bar — defines what "ready for development" actually means: required states, finished copy, edge cases, what to measure once live, and test scenarios. A quarterly survey with deliberately unchanged questions gives a trend rather than a snapshot.
• Brought AI into how the design team works. Built the Provenance Atlas, a tracker showing where an insight originated and whether it survives as it passes through AI-assisted workflows. Partnered with product leadership on AI-experimentation and future-state prototypes using Figma Make, and ran demos and workshops so the techniques spread beyond me.

UX/UI Lead — Chatloop

November 2023 – February 2025

User-generated content platform, and one of only nine global platforms with Apple's default browser status. My remit was to build the systems and processes a rapid growth phase needed.

• Took Chatloop for Business from proposition to proof of concept in 12 months — owning the go-to-market strategy, acquisition strategy and validation using human-centred design toolkits.
• Designed and released three new propositions — Chatloop Portal, Review Loops and Chatloop Embeds — now driving user engagement, conversion and business growth across a range of industries, and pushing traffic back to partners' own domains. Secured key partnerships including Co-op Live, who used the embeds to drive premium space upsell through their 'FanCam' feature.
• Built the Chatloop Experience Panel (CXP) to tighten the feedback loop with business partners, feeding a scalable analytics platform and dashboard that became pivotal to the new business acquisition strategy and CRO product.
• Redefined internal sprints, product and research workflows around iterative testing and CXP feedback — setting the course and direction of the Chatloop for Business proposition.
• Developed and embedded a comprehensive native and web-based design system, plus its contribution workflow, into a new Figma Organisation plan. Aligned to BEM naming structures so the handoff from design to development ran seamlessly.

Product & Service Designer — Absurd

June 2021 – November 2023

• Entain — a common language and a single source of truth. Designed and established an insights-driven design system and scalable white-label components for a global entertainment organisation, empowering their teams to differentiate and expand the product. Co-designed with Design and Engineering to build a shared language between them, increasing efficiency and reducing time-to-market.
• Enterprise platform — better ways of working. Designed an enterprise product and platform for a Entain, transforming how product and UX teams carried out their work. Supported the adoption of forward-thinking Figma workflows and methods that boosted transparency, established effective routines and encouraged positive habits, notably heightening employee engagement and satisfaction.
• Vita Living — from bricks and mortar to tech influencer. Elevated a leading property client's value proposition by validating a user-centric, deep-connection social app. The shift redefined the resident experience and significantly enhanced satisfaction and engagement, driving repeat revenue and resident tenure.
• Logistics and distribution — finding the root of invoicing errors. Led a discovery phase into the contributing factors behind invoicing errors, then developed targeted recommendations and identified opportunities aligned to human-centred design principles. The result: optimised internal processes and organisational structure, and real savings in time and resource.

Freelance Product & Service Designer

August 2018 – June 2021

• Fast Thinking, London. Put streamlined design processes in place, enabling the Fast Thinking team to expand their self-serve marketing platform, refine workflows and shorten time to market.
• Early, London. Introduced and integrated UX practices and methodologies from scratch. Early diversified its services, opened the door to a substantial increase in clients, and established a reputation as an industry innovator.
• Neighbourhood Pantry delivery service. Advocated for and facilitated the design of a high street delivery service covering multiple London postcodes, with a clear goal: reduce waste and bolster local entrepreneurship.
• Spectrum community app. Introduced the idea and mapped the strategic possibilities for a new events feature for Spectrum, empowering users to safely explore and revisit events in a post-lockdown world.

Head of Creative — Aerate

August 2018 – December 2019

• Long-term pain management. Facilitated HCD workshops that built strong connections with communities committed to improving pain management. These sessions identified and prioritised the vital features of a groundbreaking pain management solution — the work depended on listening actively and designing inclusively around the core users and their distinct needs.
• Mentorship platform. Shaped organisational decision-making with strategic, user-centred insight into the commercial potential of a one-to-one mentorship platform. The insights encouraged businesses to adopt it as a core part of their CSR initiatives, and made access easier for the mentees it was built for.
• Digital sofa configuration service. Managed the proposals, research plans, developer kits and documentation behind an advanced configuration service. The collaboration moved the team towards a more flexible, iterative approach and helped prioritise features for an intricate build.

Earlier

Graphic Designer, Early Marketing · June 2017 – Aug 2018 Graphic Design & Marketing Executive, SkinChemists · Jan 2017 – Jun 2017 Junior Designer, Protein World · Jun 2016 – Jan 2017 Visual Specialist, Apple Covent Garden · Oct 2013 – Jun 2016

Education

General Assembly — User Experience Design, 2021 (100%) University of the Arts London — BA (Hons) Graphic and Media Design, 2:1 (2011–2014)

References

Available on request.