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Thomas Essl

  • About
  • Journal
    • Journal
    • Creativity
    • Humanity
    • Design
    • Ingenuity
  • Newsletter ↗
  • Podcast
  • Contact

Why What How Who

I find the right problems,
design experiences, and refine products

 
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My teams come in small, tightly connected units. That's good for collaboration and gives individuals exposure to all parts of a project. It's also how I learned the trade. As a result, I am now able to own any part of a creative project. Though I can really show my muscles before pixels get involved.

 
 

 
 
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Service design and product strategy

“It’s not easy finding a hybrid in both UX & Service Design (I mean real Service Design) and it’s exactly what we needed. Thomas carried out robust research and validation with analysis, translating insights into designs. Look forward to working together again.”
— Veronica Naguib, The BIO Agency

When teams venture into unfamiliar spaces at the frontend of innovation, I help break down complexity, understand entire systems, and focus on solving the right problems, leading to products that find adoption and drive outcomes. From the start, I look for opportunities at the intersection of Business, Technology, and Ethnography. To connect the dots into a coherent vision and principles to guide a team, I might do these things:

  • Design Sprints

  • Service and user journey mapping

  • Stakeholder interviews

  • Competitor/comparator analysis

  • Brand/product/design principles

  • Blue sky concept creation

  • Workshop and sprint facilitation

  • Guerrilla research, and more

 
 

 
 
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User Experience Design and Research

“Thomas is a great creative lead, excellent communicator and invaluable team player. He generated a large volume of quality ideas on a scale from quick fixes to blue-sky innovation, orchestrated interactive workshops that helped us prioritise what to focus on, and kept us informed and took on board feedback during rapid delivery cycles.”
— Gary Cornish, Experian

Collaborating with Product Managers, Engineers, and Business Owners under a constant influx of user feedback is where magic is made and where I make ideas come to life. Part of my day-to-day are:

  • Ethnography and context interviews

  • Concept generation, wireframing

  • Interactive prototyping

  • AGILE product development

  • Design Sprints

  • Usability testing and reporting

  • Quantitative research

 

 
 
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UI Design and implementation

“I thoroughly recommend Thomas. He quickly grasped the subject matter of my business and the needs of our customers, advocated user centred design and created solutions based on in-depth research and stakeholder interviews. He crafted aesthetic and functional designs, and effectively worked with our development team to ensure delivery.”
— Victor Boardman, SwissRe

I know. You can’t be great at everything, right? Well, while my focus lies on the frontend of innovative enterprises, I have been responsible for generating production level assets more often than not, and I always manage the collaboration between Engineering and Design to make sure the full product vision gets delivered. If you’re looking for someone who can deliver on the full end-to-end design process, I can help. I certainly am no stranger to:

  • User interface design

  • Voice and NLP/NLG design (chatbots)

  • Data Visualisation

  • Transitions and micro interactions

 
 

 
How I go about it
 

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Illustrated avatar of Thomas Essl

Thomas Essl is a designer who writes about creative and personal development. You can follow along by signing up for his newsletter and following him on Instagram and LinkedIn.

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