Tom Nicholls
Lead Product Designer
15 years designing complex digital products. I lead small design teams, stay hands-on and use AI to move from ideas to working products faster.
Case studies
Making AI dubbing a one-person job
Turning a pipeline only its engineers could run into TrueSync, a platform studios use themselves. The target: one person, one day, one hour of cinema-grade film.
Joining the gym from the app
The app’s Join button sent new members to the website, where most gave up. A native joining flow, built on location, Apple Pay and one simple default plan, more than doubled sign-ups.
Managing orders and suppliers
Order tracking, product management and financial oversight for 1,200 suppliers, shipped against a regulatory deadline.
Booking and managing your stay
New iOS and Android apps built in-house, designed around what frequent guests need.
Calculating port call costs
Digitising a paper-and-spreadsheet business so quotes take minutes instead of an afternoon — and so an invoice can be traced rather than disputed for months.
Finding outfits that suit you
Automating a manual personal-styling service so it could scale — machine-learned preferences, a tagging back office and a feed built for endless inspiration.
Choosing the right accounting software
Diagnosing low conversion on sage.com and rebuilding it — seven personas, a new IA, four rounds of iteration and three tested visual directions.
Managing your candidate pipeline
Replacing an off-the-shelf recruitment CRM heading out of support with one built for the job — benchmarked against the legacy system at every step.
Building a gym habit that sticks
Too many new members stopped going within three months. Research, ICE prioritisation and a lean live test at 9% conversion found what kept them coming back.
Understanding your energy usage
A public app for the energy you use at home and on the road — what it costs each month, and what you could realistically change.
Tracking every oil delivery
Mines, fleets and workshops ran their oil supply on phone calls and spreadsheets. We mapped the whole service, then designed the tool that gave both sides a live view of every order.
Booking a restaurant table
A well-known iOS app, neglected for two years but still earning — brought up to date with the functionality users kept asking for and a design that makes you want to eat out.
Assessing mental health risk
A mental health risk tool that new users needed intensive training for, redesigned as a guided workflow built around how clinicians actually work.
Listening to music with your friends
A social music app defined from a blank page: research with listeners, artists and brands, a product built around tiles, stacks and crowds, and an 80-person team to ship it.
"Tom plans the work thoughtfully while setting the direction in which the product should evolve. He crafts his designs with passion and care for every pixel, and is a great mentor when designers need to navigate the unknown in a fast-paced environment."
"One of Tom's strengths that makes him a valuable UXer is his dedication to putting the user first, throughout the development process. He is willing to set up, manage and communicate user research to the relevant stakeholders resulting in actionable insights."
"I'd sum up Tom's style as 'Less is more'. He's particularly good at distilling ideas to their core and calmly focussing on what's important. He makes good decisions and keeps his development team grounded to the user goals."
