nicola rushton

Hi! I’m Nicola, a product designer with 12 years experience with UX/UI design, research and helping teams ship useful & usable software.

👋

 
 
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Image showing two screenshots from an app called "Kinnd: skincare tracking, made to solve acne."

Big data meets the beauty industry.

A startup sprint, greenfield discovery research and MVP concept for an app to let people use the power of quantified self to learn about their skin.

 

Video streaming for youth sports

Video streaming and video management features for youth sports fans and coaches.

 

An NFT platform for art galleries and museums

A greenfield startup project - a marketplace where you can buy a verified NFT version of the world’s most famous artworks, and support the museums when you do.
See it live 👉

 

NFTs for the music industry

An NFT builder and management tool for a startup bringing NFTs to the world of electronic music.

 

Researching property data

Bringing an agile, startup-style process to a research project for the NSW government.

 

An app for landlords (to also make tenant’s lives easier)

A product for :Different landlords to manage their property, communicate with the property manager, and not drive their tenants totally crazy…

 

Audience management tools for Google events

I helped design a tool for events managers at Google to manage their guest lists and build awesome remote events.

 

The new digital driver’s license for NSW

With Pivotal Labs, I did the initial greenfield research and design for a government product now used by 3.9 million people. 🤩

 

Humanised GDPR for Atlassian

I ran research with Atlassian users on the right to be forgotten, to bring a human-centred attitude to legally-mandated features which could have otherwise been pretty boring.

 

A data-heavy platform for the Aboriginal Legal Service

Via the amazing pro-bono consultancy Rapido, I designed a new platform to let solicitors record client data at the point of collection, reducing a weeks-long process down to a few minutes and giving lawyers immediate access to crucial information about their clients.

 

Redesigned property management software, with a design system to match

What do you do with software that’s two years old and has never seen a designer before? I learned how to bring a pragmatic, iterative redesign to life, in the real world of a hectic startup.

 

Got hired as the first designer in a startup and built a dreamteam

At :Different, I created a design hiring process, hired a design team across Sri Lanka and Australia, and introduced research and design to our software development way of working.

Here’s some of the other interesting stuff I’ve done in the last few years:

  • I’ve spoken at conferences around the world - favourite location so far was Kingston, Jamaica (Paris is a close second)

  • I designed Postfacto, a retrospective app that grew to thousands of regular users and was kind of a Pivotal Labs staple before going open source.

  • I designed part of the CoreLogic Signature platform.

  • Did a bunch of user research in primary school classrooms as part of green field product discovery for Telstra. Cute!

  • Ran weekly research rounds on a project building a self-service tool to help Telstra customers whose internet had broken down. I probably ran 150 user interviews in a year….

  • I worked with banks in Israel, Switzerland, South Africa and the Philippines via Backbase.

  • I did the UX/UI design for a survey creator platform for market researchers.

  • I helped create a NSW government service which helps small businesses get set up. Did a lot of user research in coffee shops with owners!

  • One time I hosted a six-part interview podcast for UKO, a co-living space

  • Coached a product team at Telstra on Agile product design process.

  • Ran and hosted a design meetup, which at one point was hosting weekly lunchtime talks on product and design with audiences of 100-150 every week.

  • That one time I walked half way across Spain (it took 40 days)

  • That one time I drove and camped all the way from San Francisco to the Florida Keys, then spent a month in Cuba learning Spanish

  • Spent 10 days in silence learning vipassana meditation in the Blue Mountains

  • Hey, if you’re still reading, and you want to work together - email me!

💖 remote-first 💖 kindness 💖 transparency 💖 research 💖 ethical design 💖

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