About Me

My name is Nick Hurley. I’m a User-Experience Designer, Front-End Developer and Digital Artist—and everything inbetween—based in Manchester in the UK.

I use technology to bring ideas to life, solve problems and make people smile.

About Me

My name is Nick Hurley. I’m a freelance User-Experience Designer, Front-End Developer and Digital Artist—and everything inbetween—based in Manchester in the UK.

I use technology to bring ideas to life, solve problems and make people smile.

Services

I have the skills and experience to take projects from the first strands of an idea right through to a fully fledged, beautiful, digital solution.

Design

  • Research
  • User Experience (UX)
  • Information Architecture (IA)
  • User Interface (UI)
  • Branding
  • Graphic Design

Development

  • Front-end
  • Back-end
  • Performance Optimisation
  • Dev Ops
  • Code Reviews

Project Management

  • Strategy
  • Planning
  • Digital Project Management

Digital Art

  • Installations
  • Interactive
  • Commissions

Experience

I’ve been designing things for screens for over ten years now, working on a huge range of projects from tech startups to international agencies. I have had the privilege of working with some of the world’s best known brands.

This is a brief list of some of my fulltime work experience, academic qualifications (if you’re into that sort of thing), and a selection of some of the bigger freelance projects I’ve worked on.

Values

The process of designing something is the acumulation of many small decisions. Over the years I’ve learnt and developed a series of core principles to help guide me to make the best decisions in all my work.

Consider this my personal design manifesto of values that I believe in and bring to every project I work on.

Design is more than just how something looks

It’s how it works, right down to the composition of the atoms. Design extends beyond the visual, it’s a science. It should not be confused with art. Design has rules. Design is about order, art is about expression.

Accessibility as a default

Accessibility isn’t a luxury or an afterthought. It is a core requirement of design. Better accessibility improves people’s experiences, increases the reach of the message, and helps reinforce the longevity of a design. An escalator is still a functioning set of stairs, even without power.

It is my job to fight for the user

Design is all about empathy. Without empathy for the user, design is destined to fail. Putting yourself in the shoes of your user gets harder the longer you’ve been working on something, but never stops being important.

Always try to solve the problem

Don’t get caught up in the specifics of the technology. Focus on solving the problem first. Ultimately, the way you solve it and what technology you use doesn’t matter. What matters is that the problem is being solved in the best way possible.

Iterate, iterate, iterate

Use what’s gone before and build on it. A design is never finished. There is always room for improvement, no matter how small. Learn from the mistakes as much as the successes and stand on the shoulders of giants. Constant evolution is better than occasional revolution.

Test early and test often

Assumptions are made about expectations, behaviours and contexts all the time. Test those assumptions by getting your work in the hands of real users as early and as often as possible. Even a low-fi paper prototype is better than no testing at all.

Start small

The most challenging design problems come from the use case that has the most constraints. Start there first. Thinking about information and processes in their most restricted contexts and environments encourages thoughfulness and exacting consideration, which often results in the most elegant solutions possible.

Collaborate

Don’t be precious about your designs. Be democratic. Where appropriate co-design. That doesn’t mean design by committee, it means sharing a sense of ownership with the team and users. At the early stages of the process a pen and paper is a much more collaborative design tool than a highly polished comp..

Awards

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