Luke Dowding - UX/UI Designer
About Me
I am a Senior UX Designer from the south of England, from a little town called Blandford Forum. It's about 30 minutes from some really lovely beaches in Bournemouth and about a 2 hour drive east to London. I'm from a county called Dorset, which is known for its Jurassic coastline, rolling hills, beaches, and countryside. I'm a country boy at heart, I have never lived in or near a big city until I moved to Montreal, Canada. It was quite a big culture shift. Since moving to Montreal a lot has changed in my life. I got fitter, I worked a lot harder and started to really focus on my career and learning new things. I became Vegan, when I learned about all the needless suffering animals endure. I never thought I would go Vegan, but I have never looked back since and love it. I'm a massive petrolhead and love to do track days and take trips down to the Nurburgring in Germany. Always had a love for Cycling and have spent countless hours on my bike, racking up the miles and going for KOM (king of the mountain) on Strava (a fitness app) and trying to beat my friends.
Spare Time & HobbiesÂ
You could find me spending my spare time doing all kinds of things, working on a project, learning a new skill, editing a YouTube video, aim racing, in the gym or out training. I always like to set myself some kind of design challenge, and once an idea gets into my head it has to be done.
One side project I worked on a few years back was the popular sim racing overlay Racelabs, where I did all the UX/UI design work for their overlays and user interface which was a unique and fun challenge. I haven't worked on that for a couple years but its always nice to see thousands of people still using it.
In 2019 I started my own business with a good friend Matt, a Social Gym app called Wotive which we still work on to this day. Wotive is a massive challenge and something I hope one day becomes massive. We had both dedicated huge amounts of our life to Wotive, pulling in all our knowledge and expertise to build something great. Its already grown from a small side project to an app with thousands of users and we hope to one day grow and have our own team.
Career & Experience
I started in the web design world sometime in 2010. I would make websites for myself, family and friends. Mainly just for fun, but it triggered my passion for design and the web was a great outlet for me. I learned Front-End Development by watching videos, following industry leaders and a lot of practice. After a little while, I started my own Freelance company called Pixellant, where I aimed to work with clients and proper projects. This taught me a lot of skills very fast and this is when I first started to learn about UX Design and a way of thinking about website design more in-depth. I landed my first professional role in Montreal in 2012, at a small ad agency where I did everything from UX/UI Design, Prototyping, Development, Client meetings to eventually leading a small team to meet our project deadlines. This is when I started to put my UX into practice, it was fast-paced, with lots of clients, lots of deadlines but it was a great start for me and a lot of fun.
It wasn't until I moved to a product based company called Playster, where I could start to stretch my UX Design legs. There was lots of opportunities and more time to implement UX Practices such as Personas, Storyboarding, User Maps, Scenarios, Wireframing, Prototyping, Designing, Testing, and more. It was very exciting to be working on a big user-centric product and competing with companies such as Netflix, Spotify, Audible, and Tidal. I was able to work on and improve the UX and Conversion rates on things like signup flow for web and app, cancellation flow, user onboarding, account management, search, marketing, email campaigns and landing pages. We also took a very analytical approach, every design or idea was backed up with data and tested. My approach to all these tasks or features was always making the best experience for the user, while meeting our product goals and requirements. Understanding the user's expectations and problems by understanding who they are, what services or apps they currently use, and meeting them and asking questions.
Since moving back to the UK I moved into Senior UX Designer Roles, I've worked at MWR Infosecurity which later became F-Secure. There I was the lead UX Designer for the internal and external product. Being a security company lots of software was built in-house which gave me great direct access to my users. As fellow UX designers will know, access to your users can be tough so having the opportunity to grab a user at any time was great!
I am currently a Senior UX Engineer at a data privacy company which brings along a whole new set of challenges. Since starting the role I've been the lead solo designer to redesign their entire platform as they push their product to fit the changing market and so did their users. It's been challenging working on a product that was driven by data scientists since its inception, but as the market changed so did the user base to a marketeer with a much wider audience. Our product is very complex and making that simple for our users has been a rewarding adventure.
What's next?
There is always something to learn, who knows where my passion for design will take me. My main goal for the next few years is for Wotive to become a success.
- Luke