Speaker and panellist information for Design System Day 2023
Speakers
Our speakers came from organisations across the UK and international public sector. We were joined by folks working on design systems from notable companies too.
Day 1 speakers
Kelly Lee (GOV.UK Design System)
Kelly is a delivery manager on the GOV.UK Design System team. Before joining the Government Digital Service, she worked at Jobcentre Plus in a variety of roles including business coach, performance team leader and financial assessor.
Imran Hussain (GOV.UK Design System)
Imran is a community consultant with over 10 years experience building communities across different sectors. He believes communities can be a force for good in society and loves working with communities that have a positive impact on public life.
He is currently Community Designer at Government Digital Service, a department in the UK government. He works on creating the right conditions for a community to thrive around the ever-popular GOV.UK Design System.
Rachel Male (Scottish Government)
Rachel is User Researcher and works in the Social Security Directorate for the Scottish Government. Rachel helps design disability and low income benefits for the people of Scotland and currently leads research operations focusing on operationalising their user research. Rachel has a passion for ensuring user research is effective, efficient and informative.
Samantha Ernstzen (Scottish Government)
Sam is the Head of Design in Digital Transformation, Digital Directorate, Scottish Government. Sam has been at ScotGov for 6 years after nearly 20 years in the private sector. She launched products, services and new brands for HSBC, Virgin and EE. Sam is a passionate advocate for user-centred approaches and taking a design-led approach. She loves facilitating and bringing mindfulness approaches from yoga and meditation to enable problem solving.
Jennifer I’Anson (Scottish Government)
Jennifer is a lead product manager within the Digital directorate of the Scottish Government responsible for mygov.scot and gov.scot. She is also Product Owner of the Scottish Government’s Design System from its inception, helping launch it during the pandemic.
GOV.UK Design System team
The GOV.UK Design System team is responsible for the implementation and maintenance of styles, components and patterns on the GOV.UK Design System.
Deborah Dada (Storelab)
Deborah is a product designer with a strong focus on crafting meaningful user experiences and simplifying complex business solutions. Deborah brings a wealth of hands-on experience in UX principles and creating design systems with expertise that spans research, design systems and success metrics, underpinned by a design-thinking approach. Deborah currently works at StoreLab and contributes to enhancing user satisfaction.
Caroline Jarrett (Effortmark)
Caroline is the forms specialist. She advises organisations on how to make forms easier, improve websites and business processes. Her work spans all the types of design that will improve forms. Caroline is a sought-after speaker, trainer and author. Her latest book is ‘Surveys that work: a practical guide for designing and running better surveys’.
Frankie Roberto (independent)
Frankie Roberto is a lead interaction designer who has worked on several services across different government departments, including ‘Apply for teacher training’ and ‘Ethnicity facts and figures’.
He’s also an experienced contributor to the design community and the GOV.UK Design System.
Vicky Teinaki (Student Loans Company)
Vicky is a designer and UX Lead at Student Loans Company. She’s worked across UK government at Government Digital Service, Department of Work and Pensions, and HM Revenue & Customs as a user researcher and interaction designer. Vicky also has a background as a developer, having done Drupal, WordPress theming, and module/plugin development.
Ellis Capon (Just Eat)
Ellis is a product person on the design system at Just Eat, making your experience when ordering that post night out Maccy D’s just that little bit better.
Janice Hannaway (ResearchU)
Janice is an empathic leader, a trauma-informed user researcher, therapist, and coach with experience working with people who have experienced the effects of trauma. She champions the psychological safety of user-centered design teams and highlights the potential harm from research and design on users. A co-founder of ResearchU Training Academy, she delivers specialist trauma-informed training.
Kate Every (Mastek)
Kate is a lead service designer at Mastek, specialising in inclusive and ethical design and delivery. She led on accessibility, inclusive and equitable design for the UK’s COVID-19 testing roll-out at NHS Digital. Heading up Mastek’s service design practice, she champions inclusive, trauma-informed approaches to research and design.
Helen Baron (The Emily Davison Centre)
Helen leads the Move-On team and is Centre Manager at the Emily Davison Centre supporting domestic abuse survivors to access work, education, volunteering and training. Adopting a trauma-informed approach within the service has enabled the team to see great leaps in confidence and self-esteem of the women they work with.
Tash Willcocks (TPXimpact)
Tash has spent over 25 years shaping future change-makers. First as Programme Leader of BA and MA Graphics at Salford University, then as Director of Masters at Hyper Island, working with the BBC, UN, NHS, Unilever and Adidas. After joining Snook, Tash created the learning design hub and launched the Snook Design Academy. Her most recent venture is joining TPXimpact to design and build their design academy.
David Cox (GOV.UK Design System)
David is Senior Accessibility Specialist on the GOV.UK Design System team, working on accessibility improvements that increase the accessibility of hundreds of government services that use our components. He advocates for a more intentional approach to accessibility, with greater focus on creating good experiences for all users, rather than just creating equivalent experiences for those using assistive technologies.
Day 2 speakers
Oliver Binns (GOV.UK One Login)
Oliver is a software engineer from Yorkshire with a Master’s degree in Computer Science. He has worked on mobile apps for airlines, healthcare, and government, with a focus on iOS development.
Chris Choy (GOV.UK One Login)
Chris is a UX design lead with a Computer Science degree. He worked as an SAP consultant before designing and delivering digital platforms and mobile apps, with a focus on experience design.
Helena Trippe (GOV.UK One Login)
Helena is the Head of User Centred Design for GOV.UK One Login, looking after user research, design, content design, technical writing and accessibility. She has worked as a service designer and design lead at the Government Digital Service, Department of Housing Communities and Local Government, and a number of local authorities.
Frankie Roberto (independent)
Frankie Roberto is a lead interaction designer who has worked on several services across different government departments, including ‘Apply for teacher training’ and ‘Ethnicity facts and figures’.
He’s also an experienced contributor to the design community and the GOV.UK Design System.
Katharine Beer (Department for Education)
Katharine Beer from the Department for Education is dedicated to crafting accessible and compassionate user experiences.
Abigail and Chloe Baldwin (Buttercrumble)
Twin sisters, Abigail and Chloe Baldwin founded the award-winning creative studio, Buttercrumble. Their specialist blend of design and strategy helps community-sensitive brands become the go-to choice for their audience, and authority in their industry. This is something they’ve helped to achieve for clients such as John Lewis and Mamas & Papas.
Sacha Zarb (GOV.UK Pay)
Sacha is a product manager on GOV.UK Pay, working on improving the experience for the 700 services that use the platform. GOV.UK Pay is currently building new features like recurring card payments, mobile wallets and soon open banking to make it the default for payments in government.
Simone di Fresco (DOS Design)
Simone is a design system specialist and facilitator at DOS Design which is working collaboratively in design with Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finance. Beyond UX design, Simone is a facilitator in design and research workshops, emphasising co-creation and user-centricity.
Laura Smith (Unboxed)
Laura is a lead designer at Unboxed, specialising in content. With particular experience in digital health, Laura has a keen interest in the importance of language and words in helping people access healthcare services.
Sylvie Abookire (independent)
Sylvie is a service designer specialising in public health, and a coach in transitions and life design. Sylvie was formerly a civic designer at The Lab @ DC, an applied research team in the Washington DC government. Some of her previous projects focused on housing stability and emergency responses to mental health crises.
Daniel Fontaneda (Bumble)
After working as a product designer at Vodafone Group and Amazon, Daniel now leads the design system at Bumble within a complex environment where the design system supports 3 products: Bumble Date, Badoo and BFF (Bumble for Friends). Daniel’s role is to lead the definition and implementation of the product.
Ciandelle Hughes (GOV.UK Design System)
Ciandelle is an Interaction Designer on the GOV.UK Design System. She is an advocate for accessible design as well as a strong believer in human-based design.
Ashley Watson-Nolan (Just Eat)
Ashley is a Principal Engineer at Just Eat Takeaway with over 15 years experience in web development and is a fan of all things visual. He specialises in component-driven development and front-end architecture and is passionate about emerging frontend technologies. He hacks about with CSS and JavaScript, and he blogs on his website.
Kate Thomas (PayPal)
Kate has been unravelling knotty content puzzles for more than 20 years. She’s worked in agencies and large institutions and organisations in Australia, the US and the UK, and is currently Content Architect for PayPal.
Vicky Teinaki (Student Loans Company)
Vicky is a designer and UX Lead at Student Loans Company. She’s worked at the Government Digital Service, Department of Work and Pensions, and HM Revenue & Customs. Vicky has worked as a user researcher and interaction designer. Vicky has a background as a developer, having done Drupal and WordPress theming and module/plugin development.
Louis Chenais (Specify)
Louis is the co-founder and Chief Evangelist at Specify, a DesignOps startup that helps organisations manage their brand identity at scale. Louis is also a contributor of the Design Tokens W3C Community Group (DTCG) whose objective is to create a standard format for design tokens and promote best practices.
Ethan Marcotte (Autogram)
Ethan is a web designer, speaker, and author who’s best known for creating responsive web design. Over the last two decades, his design practice has focused on designing and building beautiful, accessible web experiences, and on helping organisations create more effective design systems. He is a partner and cofounder at Autogram, a strategic consultancy that works at the intersection of design systems and content management.
Steve Messer (independent)
Steve is a freelance product person, working on the GOV.UK Design System currently. He’s passionate about innovation for the public good and open, ethical product design. He’s worked at startups, Government Digital Service and NHS Digital, and has taught product management to people from numerous companies through General Assembly.
Debra Churchill (Ontario Public Service)
Debra’s career has focused on human services. Before leaving New Zealand for Toronto, Canada, Debra worked in operational and policy roles. Since 2015 Debra has used a service design methodology to co-create and re-design programs and services. Debra has been part of transformation projects including digital transformation, developmental services transformation, and transfer payment modernisation.
Gordon Guthrie (Scottish Government)
Gordon is a research fellow at the Scottish Government on the First Ministers Digital Fellowship Programme. His professional life started as a code monkey in the private sector and has ranged from Chief Technical Architect at if.com, scalability guru at bet365 and ending up as a Silicon Valley VP of Engineering. He has worked in public policy in London, Belfast and Scotland.
Jane Martin (Government Digital Service)
Jane is a senior service designer at the Government Digital Service. Before this she worked for 20 years as a theatre producer and specialist in arts-based methods in international development. She’s worked in over 20 countries including 10 years in Cambodia, working with some of the most marginalised groups in the country.
Betty Mwema (Government Digital Service)
Betty Mwema is a senior service designer in the GOV.UK Forms team at the Government Digital Service. She has worked in the social and private sectors for 7 years, with a strong emphasis on inclusivity and ethics. Betty enjoys creating and improving design methods, to ensure that we equitably and inclusively meet the needs of users.
Valentine Makhouleen (Prelude Security/New Media Studio)
Valentine is a Canadian designer specialising in interaction design, and application of design to solving complex problems. Over the years he has dedicated his time to projects and people that attempt to make the world a better place.
Hassan Nawaz (FanDuel)
Hassan is curious about people, technology, and behaviour, currently working in senior design leadership at FanDuel, MIT. Passionate about design thinking and humanising technology, Hassan has a track record of creating cohesive, data-driven experiences that drive business results.
James Carleton (PayPal)
James is Senior UX Designer on the Design System team at PayPal where he’s built and evolved the design system, its team, and community of internal users. James also enjoys contributing to improved accessibility of PayPal products and exploring design tools. James loves following design system industry events and learning from other systems designers.
Need help?
If you’ve got a question about the GOV.UK Design System, contact the team.