About Andrew
I’m a product designer living in Greenville, SC. I love fresh sneakers, beautiful pencils, and am insatiably curious to understand how things work.
While I've been designing in general for over 15 years, the last decade has focused on application design, building products that are easy and intuitive to use.
In late 2012, I began offering rapid-prototyping services under the moniker Appe Diem: I had a small window to run through discovery, create the user flow, and design the actual screens. In a day’s time, a client could see their idea brought to life in a clickable prototype, ready for a VC meeting or to engage a developer.
Fast-forward to 2014. BMW Group was ramping up an internal design and development team. After freelancing and being on my own for the previous six years, I made the decision to join their team. My role was designing the User Experience and User Interface of various apps for BMW, MINI, and occasionally Rolls-Royce. From a day-to-day perspective, this meant problem-solving with Product Owners, designing workflows for new features, and working with my dev team throughout the build process. While at BMW, I also had the chance to learn the basics of Swift/iOS development (programmatically, no storyboards), giving me a basic understanding of UIKit and SwiftUI concepts.
In 2021, I returned to the freelance world, working with various clents on problems and platforms large and small. This included the world's largest hedge fund, where the design team focused on new features for their customer-facing product including portfolio management, simplified logins, and designing a native iOS app.
My Process
To start off a project, I always ask a lot of questions to understand the idea fully. I then move on to researching and sketching ideas, which evolve into a basic user flow. Once we decide on a good direction, I’ll start working on specific styles to present, either as static mockups or a clickable prototype. Each project is different, as are the stakeholders, so I alter the deliverables accordingly.
At this point, everyone should have a good understanding of what is being built. User-testing can happen at various points along the way. Ultimately, I like to trust my instincts, then find ways to verify and validate as the project progresses.
