How does a childhood ambition to become a radio DJ, and a student fascination with the early internet lead to a career in UX? Our UX Director Guy guides us through his personal journey of discovery, and explains what he loves about what he does at Torpedo.
UX Director, 4 years.
Leading the UX team and supporting Torpedo colleagues in all aspects of Human Experience Research and Design. I’m also pretty hands-on and can be found pitching for new business, conceptualising and facilitating usability testing, creating user personas, customer journey maps, mapping out information architecture, creating wireframes and designing interfaces. I spend a lot of time using AI assistants these days – I’m ever curious about the new boundaries that can be pushed to enable new ways of working. No two days are ever the same. I’m one of those ‘T’ shaped people you hear about, who combines deep expertise in my core specialism with broad capability across adjacent disciplines.
ChatGPT is an incredible tool. I use it to help me generate draft user personas, scenarios, jobs to be done, journey maps and empathy maps to better understand the diverse audiences we encounter in the B2B world. I’m also using it to help with usability testing and lo-fi prototyping. I find myself using it increasingly at the expense of traditional tools. That said, my go-to UI design tool of choice is Figma.
I use Jira to manage team backlog, MS Teams for calls and chats, Slack for one of our clients and spend a whole load of time mapping out experiences in Miro. I depend on the entire Torpedo family to get my job done. It’s a well-oiled machine of incredibly well informed, clever people in every department. Over the course of the day I can be working with colleagues in Client Services, Content, Creative, Digital, Strategy, Motion and more to get things done. I’m really lucky to have such great skills I can tap into.
Then there’s the clients! I’m often collaborating with peers in the companies we work for, augmenting their in-house teams in delivering to a common objective.
I love being in the office, soaking up the agency vibe. It’s always great to see people and collaborate in-person over a coffee. It’s doubly great when we’ve got clients in with us and we’re able to share the fun of UX strategy and design. Aside from this I love the variety of clients. B2B is a very diverse world and it’s a real luxury to work across so many different brands to help them overcome their unique challenges. The highlight of my day is the 9am Digital Team meeting where Dom does his daily ‘name that tune’.
Having more ideas than hours in the day. Torpedo is a very creative environment and time just flies by. I never seem to have enough time to follow up on the new ideas that pop into my head.
For the last year or so I have been working alongside Autodesk’s in-house experience research, content and design team on the main Autodesk.com website. I’ve been testing and validating design concepts with real users to help them evolve a better match user mental models. By conducting usability testing at an early stage, I was able to identify pain points around navigation, search, and content clarity. This helped Autodesk’s team make confident, evidence-led changes rather than relying on assumptions or internal debate. I was also able to test out AI-generated synthetic users to form hypotheses to inform research objectives. It’s been the perfect hands-on strategic project for me and a real privilege to work with an organisation with such a high level of UX maturity.
I wanted to be a radio DJ. I loved how radio worked and used to listen with awe at shows like Steve Wright in the afternoon on Radio One. I used to make my own radio shows with my friends, recording them to cassette. My uncle made me an amateur mixing desk to I could have records and tapes of effects alongside the microphones. This eventually expanded into recording music for the various bands I was in. I loved the technical side as much as the performance side and would probably have had a podcast up and running if that kind of thing had been around at the time. Instead, I did work experience at the BBC.
More than likely something to do with audio production. If not that then in some sort of strategic foresight role, scenario planning for the future of humanity living alongside AI and robotic innovations.
I got into making websites back in 1996. I was at college back then and had become fascinated with the world wide web as a free place to publish your own content. I’d always loved Ceefax and found that I could emulate it pretty well by learning HTML! My interest and tinkering continued into university where I create a website for a student magazine and another one for my band.
When I completed my degree, I kind of fell into a Web Designer job at Central Counties Newspapers (part of the now defunct Johnston Press). My role was to primarily design and build online advertising of the day: banner ads, tile ads and feature pages for advertisers (motoring, recruitment, property) as well as brochure sites. I developed a keen interest in CSS, Javascript, accessibility, and the emergent web standards movement at the time.
Having cut my teeth on nine regional newspaper websites I made my next move to The Open University (OU) where I spent 19 years honing my craft. Here I grew with the whole UX discipline. I was the first UX Designer at the OU and in my time I grew the function, established communities of practice, devised job descriptions and career paths for UX and Content Design roles and represented UX on the University-wide Digital Governance Working Group. My next move was to Torpedo, bringing me back full circle into the commercial world of digital marketing once more.
“ Communicate clearly at every stage – what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what happens next. When people aren’t surprised, trust follows. ”
Making music! I regularly compose and record music. I spent the last year remixing and remastering some music I made with my band back in 1999. I had to transfer 4-track tape recording to digital, realign everything and polish it up. It was a lot of fun and got me back in touch with my old band mate. We’ve just started writing and recording again.
We did a team building day at some kind of outdoor activity place. There was one activity that involve driving a jeep with wrong-way-round steering. Steer left, the vehicle goes right and vice versa. That was so much fun.
The best advice I’ve been given is to communicate clearly at every stage – what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and what happens next. When people aren’t surprised, trust follows.