About Nicola

I’m a user experience designer based in Edinburgh who’s been working in the field for over 25 years. I have an MSc in digital multimedia production and a bachelor’s degree in German and Psychology.

I’ve worked in-house and freelance for private companies, digital agencies, government and Higher Education.

Over the past 8 years I’ve been specialising in UX design and user research in Higher Education with different teams at the University of Edinburgh. I’ve spent the past 4 years working on the transformation of the online provision for prospective students – the most visited area of the University of Edinburgh’s website.

This gave me the opportunity to explore the prospective student experience in depth for undergraduates, postgraduates, those looking for a PhD or or flexible part-time professional or postgraduate learning.

I started out as a front-end designer hand-coding HTML and CSS web pages and decided I wanted more impact earlier in the process to create more useful, easier to use products and services. Things which improve people’s lives.

I’m interested in the intersection between humans and technology, stemming from my interest in psychology.

I know we have the processes and tools to make useful things which work well. These can be applied at both the macro level of society or the micro level of a single interaction on a website or mobile app.

Yet, our society is filled with ineffective systems. We have institutions that operate inefficiently—sometimes bizarrely so. Why?

As a human-centred designer I help people to improve systems, streamline efficiency, make evidence-informed decisions and reduce risk. All these things make better products and services – which people genuinely need and enjoy using.