Rigorous Humanity

I’m passionate about advancing the craft of service and experience design through teaching, co-creation, and invention.

I believe there are three key behaviours that everyone can practice to make transformational, human-centred experiences happen:

Inclusion Inclusion
Integrity Integrity
Inquisitiveness Inquisitiveness

What's your design philosophy?

What I do all day

I get up every morning to bring people together to solve problems big and small (but preferably big). I typically do this by helping large, cross-functional teams understand, design, and deliver human-centred responses to complex needs.

Most recently I've been building out the consulting, facilitation, and training practices for corporate offerings at Simply Designed.

Prior to that, I established and led the Experience Strategy practice at SVB, running strategic initiatives with partners across the company to uncover unmet client and employee needs to inform delivery of digital and in-person experiences.

As Director of Data Experience Design at Capital One, I built a thriving team of designers, researchers and strategists who are transforming how over 18,000 employees experience big data every day to solve critical problems in service of more personalized customer experiences and a better-managed business.

I’ve also nurtured service and experience design practices at scale, as part of the fantastic community of designers that evolved from Adaptive Path into Capital One’s Experience Design team, by helping teams adopt new ways of working, helping leaders re-organize around experience, developing and delivering trainings to over a thousand students and counting across North America, and speaking at both internal and public conferences and events.

Leadership in service of shared outcomes

I empower teams to deliver great experiences by helping them apply the right tools for the task at hand:

Facilitation Facilitation

Leading and mentoring cross-functional teams to define their vision and strategy through ideation, requirements gathering, service definition, evolution planning, stakeholder engagement and more…

Investigation Investigation

Helping teams build practical empathy into their process to better understand their users’ needs through interviews, contextual inquiry, field research, competitive analyses, concept validation and more…

Iteration Iteration

Coaching teams to make ideas tangible sooner, refine or pivot as needed, and measure impact through wireframing, journey mapping, paper, digital, and physical prototyping, high-fidelity mockups, piloting, and more…

Experiences in service of real needs

Using the methods above, I help teams create artifacts to better understand their customers and businesses:

  • Experience Maps

    Experience Maps

  • Vision Stories

    Vision Stories

  • Service Blueprints

    Service Blueprints

  • Field Research Gallery Tours

    Field Research Gallery Tours

  • Strategic Design Tools & Methods Trainings

    Strategic Design Tools & Methods Trainings

  • Experience Storyboards

    Experience Storyboards

  • Paper Prototypes

    Paper Prototypes

  • Service Maps (a.k.a. Business Origami)

    Service Maps (a.k.a. Business Origami)

Recommendations

A few kind words from colleagues I've been fortunate to work with over the years:

Kim Rees | VP, Data Experience Design at Capital One - Kim Rees | VP, Data Experience Design at Capital One

“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Nick for over 3 years at Capital One. During that time, Nick helped establish a nascent team working on internal associate experiences at enterprise scale. Nick developed, grew, and lead a team focused on our most critical enterprise data platforms. Nick is a truly collaborative and empathetic leader and partner. He seeks diverse perspectives and is capable of integrating them into strategies and solutions. He does all of this with a smile and positive attitude. Nick is greatly missed on our team.”

Harrison Williams | VP, Data Exchange Platforms at Capital One - Harrison Williams | VP, Data Exchange Platforms at Capital One

“I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Nick over the past 3+ years. He was consistently a beacon for design discipline and elevating our user experience. And, in the most genuine and collaborative way, he created a stronger bond between product, tech and design teams along the way. Thank you, Nick!”

Jin Yang | VP, Data Experience Design at Capital One - Jin Yang | VP, Data Experience Design at Capital One

“Nick is one of the best design leaders I’ve had the pleasure of working with. He has expert level skills in service design, bigger picture thinking, organization/partnership building, and team growth. More importantly, Nick is very empathetic and has high EQ. All these traits allowed him to lead his team effectively and ship great products. He’s a role model and inspiration for our teams and partners.”

Give me a shout!

If anything you've seen here has piqued your interest, or if you'd just like to talk about cycling, cities, pottery, making bread, plant-based diets, DIY, interfaces, the future...
I'd love to chat!

Here are the best ways to reach me:

You can also grab a copy of my résumé.