My name is Vaughn, and I'm a User Experience Specialist (UX Specialist) based in Cape Town, South Africa. I live with my partner Vicki and our rescue cats: Frank, Phoebe, and Winchester.

I'm not a coffee snob, but I do enjoy a good double-espresso. Outside of work, I'm incredibly passionate about mental toughness, functional food and fitness, productivity tools and techniques, Bujinkan, airsoft, yoga, and listening to podcasts and audiobooks about resilience, leadership, innovation, and psychology.

With over eight years of experience in all aspects of UX, my key strengths lie in pushing messy, complex, early-stage product and service designs from initial kick-off to developer hand-off with little to no supervision. Capable of working alone or in a team, I also have two years of experience building and leading a small UX team of six, from scratch, across a nine-hour time-zone difference.

My key specialities include:

• Setting up, coordinating, and facilitating user research and usability testing remotely.
• Setting up and leveraging insights from digital analytics like Hotjar and Google Analytics.
• Wireframing, prototyping, and iterating on discovery-phase designs to validate an MVP.
• Collaborating across disciplines to quantify and prioritise UX fixes by cost to company.

I am proficient with Figma, Adobe XD, Balsamiq, UXPin, Axure, Optimal Workshop, Useberry, Userlytics, Hotjar, and Google Analytics. That said, software and tools are just a means to an end for me; I'll figure out how to use whatever I have at my disposal to get the job done. I have a knack for learning new workflows and tools exceptionally quickly and slot into almost any team without much onboarding.

Naturally, I thrive as a consultant or in startups and small multi-disciplinary teams with clear goals and autonomy to get the job done.

I'm on a mission to liberate the user, empowering people to shape the tools that shape their lives. When I look back on my life, I want to know I left the world better than I found it. Research shows that businesses who prioritise this reduce their risk of failure, save more money, and increase revenue.

A quiet professional who prefers to lead by example, I let my actions do the talking. Raised never to do half-jobs, everything I do is at full-throttle, or not at all. I'm the guy you call after everyone else has either given up, stuffed it up, or said it's impossible. The guy you call when you need it done, and you need it done well.

Deploy me as the tip of your UX spear!

Want more detail? Read my Origin Story.