Principal Design Practitioner

I simplify complex services by connecting user needs, business rules, policy, operations and technology — then turning that complexity into clear, usable journeys.

I’m a Principal-level designer with deep content design expertise and substantial service design experience, working on complex digital services in government and regulated environments.

My strongest work is in services that are difficult to understand, difficult to operate, or difficult to change. I start with the user journey, identify unnecessary complexity, then work backwards through the system to understand why it exists and how much of it can be removed, simplified or absorbed into the service.

“We’ve been grappling with a complex problem and have had Andy come along and propose a simple, elegant solution to resolve it.”
— Phil Addis, Senior Process Officer, HMRC

Selected work

Register for Self Assessment
Redesigning a complex HMRC registration service around user needs, automation and legacy constraints.

Tell HMRC you no longer need to send a tax return
Using live-service analytics and operational evidence to redesign a confusing set of requests and prevent user error.

Gender Recognition Certificate
Designing sensitive, evidence-heavy guidance and a document checker to make a difficult application process easier to understand and manage.

What I do

Service design
End-to-end journeys, service blueprints, operational models, discovery, live-service iteration and designing across front- and backstage systems.

Content design
Plain English, simplification, question design, validation, guidance, information architecture and reducing cognitive load.

Strategic design
Reframing messy service problems, balancing user and business needs, working through policy and technical constraints, and turning evidence into design direction.

Leadership
Leading design work, managing and mentoring designers, recruitment, capability building, standards and consultancy delivery.