Allan Corbett

At IGS, I lead the user experience engineering discipline, working across product, strategy and engineering teams to understand, design, plan and build architect scalable, user-centered solutions for vertical farming technology. I'm committed to building products with responsibility at their core, bridging design thinking with technical excellence.

My role spans UX architecture, engineering leadership, and product collaboration.

• Lead UX strategy and technical direction by collaborating with product and engineering teams to conduct and translate user research and data insights into actionable requirements and scalable architectural patterns
• Own the design system strategy and evolution of Eco, establishing standards, component architecture, and development practices that enable consistent, efficient implementation across all products and front-end technology stacks by utilising StencilJS to create web and Angular components
• Guide front-end engineering decisions and best practices, mentoring developers on component design, testing strategies, and performance optimisation to ensure high-quality implementation of user-centered solutions
• Architect and lead development of multiple user-facing applications, ensuring they meet accessibility standards, perform reliably across devices, and maintain the highest quality benchmarks
• Leverage technical expertise and design thinking to create products that drive meaningful impact whilst being understandable and usable for a wide demographic of users.

As part of cross functional teams staffed with client, contracted and offshore members, Buildit helps solve hard problems with world class expertise.

My role consisted of a mixture of design, product and development work.

• Design system thinking, prototyping as well as stakeholder management
• Client reviews and buy-in across multiple levels
• Collaborating with various departments of a client's business to help provide a clear and precise direction of travel
• Strategic approach to development of new features and products.

With an office in Edinburgh and London, MagLabs provide bespoke digital asset management solutions for media and packaging companies around the world, alongside a SAAS equivalent that is more generic and aimed at a broader range of clients. My role as the sole designer allowed me to work as part of multiple teams of developers, account managers and product managers and I was responsible for all user experience and interface decisions.

Some of my main tasks included:

• Developing features and ideas within the business whilst listening to and understanding user requirements
• Creating and managing consistent user interfaces and patterns within the multiple apps
• Meeting clients face-to-face to understand and empathise with their problems and create solutions that look beyond the initial issue
• Working in partnership with product managers and senior developers to plan and manage workload across the teams to produce consistently high quality features.

Located in Edinburgh City Centre, GeckoLabs build recruitment and data capture services for the higher education sector including web, desktop and mobile apps for a number of use cases. As the sole designer in this organisation I was required to understand and implement existing roadmapped features as well as design and write specifications that provide solutions.

Some of the main responsibilities of this role included:

• Brought a consistent and clean aesthetic to the app across platforms for both recruiters and potential students
• Helped users understand the context of the information in a number of situations - from audio calls to event curation
• Interpreted client requests to create features that are both intuitive and powerful
• Allowed users to perform complex operations with large amounts of data without being overwhelmed.

Based in CodeBase, Edinburgh and working with a global team of engineering, sales and marketing staff I was initially charged with the UI design for one of the three products that RightScale created.

As time progressed I was tasked with designing a new app to fit within the ecosystem. This needed to include the basic design templates that we had evolved towards so that the existing customers would be comfortable using it.

I also led the charge to improve the existing UI to become more modern and have a less archaic aesthetic.

Some key achievements were:

• Crafted production ready code and design
• Spearheaded a redesign of an app with over 8 years of legacy
• Key member of the team working on the RightScale style guide
• Worked across global timezones with multiple departments
• Large and sprawling codebases were refactored under my initiative to help improve the build and release process.

Working at this compact agency, I created, developed and produced numerous print and digital projects as well as delivering training and facilitating feedback sessions with clients and customers.

Some key projects are listed below:

• Sacro. Designed and built the digital hub for an organisation working towards creating safer and more cohesive communities across Scotland. Worked through the project starting from initial structural planning, through production of visuals, to building a fully responsive development site. Presented to multiple strategic boards within the organisation and adapted the site based on feedback and discussion. The finished site had a robust navigation that works well across all platforms and provides a quick, clean and understandable experience for a variety of demographics
• Pilton Community Health Project. Working with the project’s various teams and departments I planned and built a new platform for the organisation to publish resources, events, updates and information for their service users. The fully responsive design is fresh, bright and colourful which reflects both the ethos and the mission of the organisation whilst being fast to load and quick to respond to user input
• FrinGeo. Working with a developer I designed, branded, marketed and built an HTML5 platform agnostic mobile app that used publicly available data to show the three nearest Edinburgh Free Fringe shows to the users location using smartphone GPS.

After graduating into a massive economic black hole, the only sensible thing for me to do was to set up as a freelance designer.

As superallan I worked on digital, branding and print campaigns for various smaller clients as well as helping them develop marketing strategies to support their business.