Steve McKinney

Steve McKinney

UX/UI Designer in Manchester

About

As a designer, I combine strong interface design with a thorough process that validates ideas through research, data, and usability testing to achieve business and customer goals.

Since 2012, I have designed websites for a variety of businesses—from startups to those that service millions of customers. My work has spanned agency, in-house, and SaaS products.

Work Experience

2022 — Now
Senior UX/UI designer at TalkTalk
Manchester

I lead design for the consumer sales journey at TalkTalk. I manage a team of 4 designers as well as designing day to day. We work with a broad range of stakeholders and an overseas development team across web, iOS and Android.

⭐️ Highlights

  • Designing the digital voice addition to the consumer and agent journeys. This required care in execution and understanding of a complex product to ensure vulnerable customers get the correct service
  • Redesigning critical add-on services and paving the way for scalability, as well as designing new add-on journeys for the TalkTalk Plus app for iOS and Android
  • Contributing to TalkTalk’s component library through design and documentation
  • Creating development plans, coaching and mentoring direct reports. Achieving TalkTalk’s Be Outstanding award for my contribution to TalkTalk Business
  • Leading design in our innovation sprints, managing scope and stakeholders whilst turning around prototypes in a matter of hours
2021 — 2022
UI/UX Designer at fu3e
Remote/London

fu3e. is a real estate software platform that allows property developers keep track of things like overheads, project progress and managing teams. I worked within an agile team to iterate on and create product features in response to business needs and improving the user interface with best practice UX.

⭐️ Highlights

  • My work contributed to investment in the business
  • Improved task completion times with a new iterative design for a core feature
  • Contributed to a redesign of the app
2017 — 2021
UX Designer at Silentnight
Manchester

As a UX designer it was my primary goal to help to deliver outstanding customer experience across all digital channels, along with other members of the UX team.

⭐️ Highlights

  • Designed in-store app like experiences for Yours & Mine product launch
  • Lead the design and build of key pages, which reduced friction for customers finding products
  • Lead the design and build of the buying guide, which has helped customers find and understand products better
  • Redesigned the checkout process to provide clarity on delivery times, choosing a delivery date and help the business increase sales through upsells
  • Lead the redesign & build for the internal company website which involved multiple company departments
2012 — 2017
Designer at CandidSky
Manchester

Working with clients in a variety of industries to deliver design within a budget. I wore a lot of hats as the first full time hire.

Projects ranged from lead generation and ecommerce using Wordpress & Woocommerce to custom builds for housing, ticketing and energy. Occasional branding and email too.

⭐️ Highlights

  • Designed the brand and website for a dog food subscription service
  • Design for English Lakes ice cream website
  • Design and build of four websites for a law firm that allowed them to create pages flexibly
  • Helping many small businesses improve their online presence

A small selection of almost 6 years' worth of design work is attached. Not in chronological order.

Side Projects

2015

I would write regularly about design and code. This was from 2015–2018 but now it's much more intermittent.

Contact

Dribbble
Twitter
GitHub

Features

2024
2024

Redesigned my blog and launched that in March 2024. It was subsequently featured on lapa.ninja.

2017

Another article featured in Awwwards Elements about horizontal scrolling navigation.

2017

An article I had written about kerning and tracking was featured in Awwwards elements.

2017

My blog was featured in Best Website Gallery

2017

My blog was featured in Siteinspire

2016

An article I had written on CSS Shapes was featured in an issue of CSS Layout News.