I find out what people actually need, then design and build it. I work across both halves of the double diamond. My research case studies show the first, most fully my student housing study: discovering and defining the right problem, from brief to recommendations. My own venture, a music marketplace in private development, shows the second: developing and delivering the solution. I designed the user experience and interface for every side of it, then specified, built and tested the platform behind it, from payments and third-party integrations to release management and security.
It comes from my move from fashion creator markets into music creator markets. I followed the outcry over how little artists earn from streaming, then ran my own unfunded investigation into what makes music careers hard to sustain, for artists and the professionals around them. Since learning formal user research in 2025, I'm putting the venture through the structured discovery it didn't get at the start, using the method behind my studio, Fruityard.
From engineering, through retail and the music industry, to formal user research. Numbered in the order I did them.
2025 – 2026
New founders rarely get proper discovery before they build. The overview: why a studio and an academy, what's built, and what I changed. The two services each have their own case below.
Read the case study → · 5-minute read
Five services as small cases: Discovery, ad prototypes, free planning tools, the Room Fit Review and the later stages. Includes a working demo of the new break-even calculator.
Read the case study → · 5-minute read · Try the calculator →
How the courses were ideated from the roles in a real client project, which five I held back, and why two became pilots.
Read the case study → · 4-minute read
A student ad competition for a real client, redesigned so teams prototype with AI, test on 10+ real people and pitch what they learned. Testing carries as many marks as the idea.
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My student housing study becomes a course: postgraduates learn the method on it, then run paid, supervised reviews of student housing. Demand is being tested with seven audiences first.
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Labels, promoters, record shops and new founders, each with a free tool, a self-serve plan and a full Discovery. Housing and games are the next sector cases.
Read the case study → · 4-minute read
Test a game's world, characters and adverts with players before paying for production. Built from my Skate. research, starting in Bristol.
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EA rebuilt a cult skate series as a free-to-play live service. A year in, players praise the skating and reject what's built around it, and a fan mod passed 350,000 downloads in days. A scorecard of how EA manages innovation, and five changes I'd make.
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Each change answers a finding from the team test: one bike ride, foraging and dyeing the same day, real samples and a field guide for Cardiff.
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My idea, upcycling clothes with foraged dyes, was prototyped and tested with students. Then delivery broke down.
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An agency team takes over a client's research on why girls drop out of sport. The vote and the evidence picked different ideas, the research had a gap, and the honest answer to the client was "not ready to build".
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I checked five providers' booking pages against the six things students said they needed. None covered all six, and room fit was weakest everywhere.
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How international postgraduates find a room before they arrive in Bristol. Stress peaks at 6.0 out of 10 when they sign for a room they haven't seen. Includes a possible critical finding our analysis lost, and how I'd fix the process.
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2022 – 2023
There was no grime chart. I proposed a small, testable change: let creators and fans propose and vote on new subgenre charts, so niche artists and their fans can find each other.
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I followed one psych-rock band through every route a new listener could use to find them. Every free route was a dead end, and the paid route wasn't what I first thought.
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2018 – 2022
A crowdsourcing model where fans help design clothes before they're made, developed without funding in Lisbon. In 2022 it moved into music.
Read the case study → · 4-minute read
My final-year demonstrator, run again when I repeated the year I spent away in Lisbon. Follow-first community building beat two paid promotions combined.
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A third-year group project that found Instagram curator accounts had a marketplace's audience but no way to sell.
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2014 – 2020
A marketing plan for renting or part-exchanging kids' bikes as they grow: the competition, the cash-flow risk inside a made-to-order business, and where shops and concierge services fit.
Read the case study → · 5-minute read
Before design and research, I trained as an electrical and electronic engineer. I learned to build both halves of a product: the circuit and the code that runs it.
Why it matters now: I still build both halves. Today it's my own marketplace platform and Fruityard's tools, specified, reviewed and tested by me. Write-ups of the individual engineering projects will follow as I recover the files.
A college brief: solve a real problem with a circuit on a £20 budget. I chose my own problem, a phone too quiet to play music out and about, and designed, built and tested a battery-powered amplifier speaker.
Read the case study → · 5-minute read
One person can run the whole operation, from finding out what people need to keeping the live product safe. Each stage links to the work that proves it. When something goes wrong, I fix the process, not just the problem.
I plan research from the question, not the method, then pick the methods that each answer part of it.
Case study 05 · Finding student housing from abroad
Across the trail
I turn raw data into a short list of problems, ranked by how much they matter and how sure we can be.
Case study 05 · Finding student housing from abroad
See case study 05 through Define → · The opportunity tree, then and now →
When it went wrong
A finding was lost between methods in my case study. These became standing rules for every study:
Across the trail
Walkthroughs, then clickable screens in the real styles, then rules that come out of testing them.
Case study 06 · Women in sport: ideating from a handover
Case study 07 · Nature on campus: prototype and test
Across the trail
I write the spec, build with Claude Code, review every change and test on staging with real test purchases.
How I work with AI → · What I've shipped →
Case study 07 · Nature on campus: delivery
Across the trail
When it went wrong
Incident response. When our hosting provider reported a security incident, I rotated every secret (Stripe, email, Shopify and others), revoked the old ones, turned on two-factor everywhere, redeployed, and wrote a data-protection self-assessment.
Data and hosting. I moved the production backend to an EU region: backup first, row counts checked before and after, then a fresh deploy and real sign-in and form checks. Secrets live in a password manager.
Stripe Connect checkout
Custom app on a dev store
Node.js, SQLite, Railway
Symfony backend, Vercel front end
I build with Claude Code rather than writing everything by hand. I'm the one who decides what gets built, reads each change, tests it end to end, and runs the deploy.
Each demo gets its own space: the experience it gives the user, why it was built, how I designed it, and how it's built.
Demos of my marketplace are available on request while it's in private development.
The experience. A promoter planning a night enters what it costs and what they'll charge, and sees straight away how many people they need through the door to break even. No account, no email and no sign-up stand between them and the answer.
Why it was built
It's the first rung of a ladder for promoters: a free tool that's useful on its own, then a self-serve planning sprint, then a full discovery engagement. Value comes first, and the sales conversation only starts if the person wants more.
Design process
How it's built
Backs up: Fruityard site and tools (04).