More about me…

Hi, nice to meet you!

Introduction

Part one

My name is Andrew Robert Burgess, or Andy for short. I’m a User Experience Lead, having worked previously as a Graphic and Digital Designer, and a Front End Developer since I started my career in 1999. This has helped me get a really good understanding of not just the processes which go towards creating a great user experience for the product or service on which I am working, but also experience and knowledge of how best to work with production teams, and knowing what is required to fully optimise that product or service to give the best message and representation.

Professional background

Part Two

You can find a summary of my professional background and more about me on my LinkedIn page

I was born in Colchester, Essex in December 1979, and went to Holmwood House school, then on to Charterhouse in Surrey, where I finished A levels in English, Design and Technology and Art, for which I pioneered the first use of animation for the Art exam that the school had seen. I went from there to Teesside University in Middlesbrough, to study a BA in Animation and Visualisation, having completed a year beforehand working for various web design companies during the era of the dot com boom. Completing my course, I realised that my strengths lay more in web design rather than animation, and ended up getting my first job with Gerald Eve, a firm of property experts and surveyors, working in their Graphics department.

When I joined, the department had grown from the traditional map-making department, providing maps for use in property reports, to designing and producing printed property particulars. In the seven years I spent working there, I brought my experience of web design to further extend the capabilities of the department to include online property websites for properties such as The Queens Club, 9 Grosvenor Square (Tony Blair’s old offices) and 30 St Mary’s Axe (colloquially known in London as The Gherkin), as well as portfolio sales for companies such as Charles Wells pubs. I also used my knowledge of digital animation and modelling to help produce presentations for major banks, extruding and manipulating flat floor-plans to create 3D representations of buildings, which could then be imported into Flash for leave-behind presentations that stood out above the average Powerpoint style presentation that the competition were using.

Following my time at Gerald Eve, I decided to break out into freelance work, and incorporated my company, SableIndustries in January 2011, as a base from which I could produce work for clients, and contract my time out to other companies. During this time, I produced work for a range of companies, including Clyde & Co, Somo Global, and Grosvenor Search, working as a Digital Designer and a Front End Developer.

I went back to working full time for Springer Healthcare as a Front End Developer, where I helped transform the role to be centred more around User Experience. I completed a course with User Focus, led by Dr David Travis, a leader in the UK User Experience community, and worked on projects such as MediLib and MedEngine for major pharmaceutical clients such as Pfizer and Sanofi. I moved on to work for a year at Barclays Wealth and Investment Management, helping to produce their Barclays One platform for high-earning customers.

The past five years, I have been working for Springer Nature, the parent scientific publishing company to Springer Healthcare. During my time there, I have worked across a number of projects as a UX Designer, including Springer Materials, Nature Nano, and BioMed Central. I have also been part of the growth of the User Experience Design department, becoming a User Experience Lead. As well as helping improve the department as a whole, I also helped build and manage a group of User Experience professionals in Springer Nature’s office in Pune, India, working alongside the production teams there.

I am now looking for a new opportunity, to help infuse user experience into the heart of a company, and improve not only the products and services that they produce, but also to help improve the processes with which they produce them. If you are interested in me coming to work for you, please drop me a line.

Playing bass with The Memepunks

Playing bass with The Memepunks. See the full video here.

Other stuff about me

Part Three

Aside from the professional side of my life, I also enjoy the following things: