Freelance working on system development, user-centred design and web accessibility. Using the best open source development tools and databases and working with a variety of companies including HSBC, AXA, User Vision, Oxford University Press and Africa Now.

Projects have included information architecture and intranet design and development for internal
HSBC teams. This incorporated UCD (user centred design) into technical development and
information architecture techniques to develop content framework.

CMS architecture and development, web site architecture, usability and accessibility work for Oxford University Press Journals site. This involved working with Bricolage, Mason, Perl, Stanford University Press propriety DTL language. Extensive use of CSS was made to maximise accessibility of the new site.

Designed and developed an Exhibitions Management System for the Oxford University Press
Exhibitions department. This included extensive use of UCD techniques to maximise usability of the product. This was developed as a MVC Web Application using Mason, Perl and extensive use of CSS.

I have also carried out a number of usability assessments and accessibility conversions for various clients including Oxford University Press, the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery

Working freelance as a usability consultant with The Usability Lab, now in Edinburgh. This work
included a wide variety of tasks within full user centred design process including an information
architecture for an intranet with over 10,000 content items! Usability reviews and testing, accessibility reviews and wire framing in Visio and Omni Graffle. Clients included Britannia Building Society, learndirect Scotland, employment4students, Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest and Bank of Scotland.

Contracted as part of the Alternative Funds Service (AFS) team to develop supporting tools for
Advent’s investment management and accounting platform, Geneva. I was actively involved in a
number of projects associated with the core work of the AFS team. This included code design and
development from functional specifications, maintenance and code re-factoring for existing interfaces and third line support for live systems. Interfaces were developed in a mix of Perl and Java deployed on an Apache server with an Oracle database.

Employed as a usability consultant for User Vision Ltd in Edinburgh. This worked included a wide
variety of usability and accessibility tasks. This included user research, information architecture, wire framing, usability and accessibility testing and usability and accessibility expert evaluations. Clients included Capital One, Miller Homes, NHS, Dewar’s House of Whiskey and Houses of Parliament.

Employed as Technical Team Leader of a team of three developers within Journals IT responsible for development and support of the OUP Journals web site and internal management systems. The web site runs on an Apache server utilising mod_perl and Mason to deliver dynamic content from MySQL and Postgres databases. As well as ensuring the smooth running of the legacy systems and databases I have also actively driven the development of internal systems including product review and implementation of a new CMS, pricing management system, and ecommerce system.

I was actively involved in usability and accessibility to W3C WAI standards of web content with an excellent understanding of both areas. Involved in scoping and designing (using Task Analysis and Use Cases) an Exhibitions management system. Responsible for the implementation and development of new site design including information architecture, usability analysis and testing, deployment design and build and site code build.

Contracted to develop a content management system to manage a number of websites
Targeting the Pharmaceutical industry. Involved in full project life cycle from requirements gathering to launch. The core software was written in PHP4 with some Perl5 for administration tasks using MySQL 3.23. The system allowed the creation and management of surveys, polls (which could be syndicated to other users sites using RPCs), articles, menu systems, banner advertising and collections of web links. The user administration provided a facility to allow the administrator to set up demographic categorisation for use in personalising the presentation to the user (for example the selection of advertisements).

Contracted as Software Engineer analysing requirements, designing and developing a system to
manage variously formatted biological sequence data into a proprietary Informix 9.21 database. The data was mirrored from a number of external sites and parsed and checked using tools written in OO Perl. In order to access this data a number of Perl CGI scripts were created to perform various searches. I was involved with some requirements analysis and the functional design. I was also involved with maintenance of a legacy intranet based LIMS system written using Informix WebDataBlade scripts and Perl CGI.