Chris Sams, Designer in Norwich, United Kingdom
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Chris Sams

Verified Expert  in Design

Designer

Location
Norwich, United Kingdom
Toptal Member Since
July 7, 2020

Chris is an experienced product and experience design consultant who has been helping businesses of all sizes achieve their digital goals for over 15 years. He focuses on ensuring that all business requirements are met while keeping the user's fundamental needs at the forefront, resulting in a user-centered, viable, and relevant end product.

Portfolio

Work Experience

Senior Product Designer

2023 - 2024
British Gas
  • Collaborated with a design team to create engaging customer experiences for British Gas customers, both within Salesforce and the online portal.
  • Refined the customer journey after conducting extensive research with key stakeholders and analyzing customer insights.
  • Designed a product that involves wireframing, user testing, and prototype development. These steps refine ideas, identify issues, and ensure the final product meets user needs.
Technologies: Figma, UserZoom

User Experience Lead

2023 - 2023
Go City
  • Conducted exploratory studies to understand the back-end solution needs and system architecture capabilities, after consulting with key stakeholders and development teams.
  • Designed user journeys and wireframes to ensure a smooth user experience. I also conducted ideation sessions and user testing with stakeholders to refine the designs.
  • Future-proofed devised work through exploring and integrating bespoke improvements and utilization of AI capabilities.
Technologies: Figma, Stakeholder Engagement, Wireframing, Journey Mapping

User Experience Lead

2022 - 2023
Major League Soccer
  • Established clear project objectives with key stakeholders, and a roadmap was created to guide us towards achieving them. This was essential in defining our end goal and understanding what success looks like.
  • Created process flow diagrams for web-based soccer games to boost fan engagement ahead of the 2026 World Cup hosted by the USA. The aim was to increase sales and promote the sport.
  • Created high-fidelity wireframes and associated prototypes to establish the concept and test on stakeholders and MLS soccer fans.
Technologies: Figma, User Journeys, MVP Design, UX Prototyping, Journey Mapping

UX Designer

2022 - 2022
Spark DSG
  • Conducted customer and stakeholder interviews to understand their needs for a hospital system I was designing.
  • Elaborated a comprehensive process flow diagram that served as a discovery tool for the client, stakeholders, and project team to understand the project's overall requirements.
  • Built mobile and desktop screens to define the product and get stakeholder feedback.
  • Completed this project with one client based in New York and the other in the Midwest. Time zone differences did not affect productivity.
Technologies: User Research, UX Design, User Interviews, Wireframing, UX Research, User Workflows, Client Management, Journey Mapping

User Experience Lead

2021 - 2022
BP
  • Worked with BP's design team on modularity, a digital solution that translated organizational objectives into actionable strategies.
  • Created user personas and user stories to understand our business customers. This helped us identify potential opportunities.
  • Developed scalable wireframes and conducted stakeholder and user testing to ensure requirements were met.
Technologies: Sketch, Client Interviews, Discovery, Journey Mapping

Lead UX Designer

2020 - 2020
IBM | Al Arabiya
  • Produced user journeys based on secondary research, stakeholder interviews, and business requirements.
  • Used the core information mentioned above and defined the overall site structure and information architecture.
  • Worked with junior colleagues within the team and assisted them with their queries and user experience concerns; this was conducted remotely and face-to-face in Dubai.
  • Collaborated with the design lead, producing multiple wireframes and related clickable prototypes; this allowed me to demonstrate my thinking with the client rapidly and provided me with the ability to stress-test the concept internally.
Technologies: Slack, Abstracts, Sketch, InVision, Product Design, Figma, UX Wireframes, User Journeys, Journey Mapping

Senior User Experience Designer

2019 - 2019
Unilever
  • Worked on a new solution that would make it easier for new employees joining Unilever to onboard, providing them with a set of tools that would enable them to order essential equipment.
  • Gathered requirements from the client by running several virtual workshops and carrying out a series of one-to-one interviews with key-stakeholder.
  • Produced a range of user personas from feedback and stakeholder interviews. This allowed me to evolve my thinking into process flow diagrams and paper prototypes.
  • Defined the screens, which in turn would be integrated into a new brand style guide and ensured that my output was stress-tested with individuals across Unilever.
Technologies: Platforms, Microsoft, InVision, Sketch, Product Design, UX Wireframes, User Journeys, Journey Mapping

Senior User Experience Designer

2018 - 2018
British Airways
  • Ensured all aspects of the project were covered by recruiting as many individuals from across the company, from call center operators to hosting staff who worked face-to-face with customers at Heathrow Terminal 5.
  • Scaled my approach by producing a series of personas that we could focus on and began to independently understand unique pain points and overall requirements a customer might face when confronted with airline disruption.
  • Created storyboarding journeys to define initial screen designs and modular requirements while identifying ways in which problems can be solved by stress-testing and user-testing designs with fellow designers and stakeholders.
  • Produced wireframes using Sketch, then integrated them into InVision and Principle. This allowed me to develop a solution that could then be used for user testing purposes.
  • Conducted primary research over two days in lab conditions, on top of guerilla testing at London Heathrow's Terminal 5. This produced a rich output, as I sampled a broad spectrum of individuals, older and younger, digitally savvy and not so.
Technologies: Sketch, InVision, User Testing, Interviews, UX Research, Travel Design, User-centered Design (UCD), Product Design, Figma, UX Wireframes, UX Prototyping, Journey Mapping

Service Designer (Freelance)

2017 - 2018
British Telecom
  • Collaborated with Glasgow and London teams to implement a service design culture into the organization, which resulted in identifying strategic challenges while producing scalable solutions to subsequently resolve them.
  • Conveyed a service design methodology that involved first capturing the process and the relevant exercises within a digestible and documented format. This provided those partaking had a reference which they could refer to for future projects.
  • Developed user profiles through research and identifying segmental requirements. It was key in defining profiles early on and refining them throughout the process.
  • Performed experience mapping and used it as a research tool to capture the current practice of our identified users and used this during the conceptualization phase to facilitate additional iterations.
Technologies: Sketch, InVision, Product Design

Senior User Experience Designer

2017 - 2017
Liberty Global
  • Produced wireframes to focus individuals within the organization to define whether they meet the requirements of the intended user and whether they pushed the organizational strategy and expected future developments.
  • Formulated flow diagrams for each user story. Doing so ensured that the product could be tested at its highest level and I could validate the journey with account and development teams before the finer details were applied.
  • Worked alongside business EPAM analysts based in Minsk, Belarus, who had undertaken several exploratory studies identifying core user stories required for the interface to succeed.
Technologies: Sketch, InVision, Product Design, UX Wireframes, Dashboards
2000 - 2003

Bachelor's Degree in Business, Advertising and Marketing

University of Hertfordshire - Hatfield, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom

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