Dan Walker

Product Designer

Profile

Product designer with a fine art foundation and a decade of experience across enterprise software, a self-run creative business, and self-initiated projects. Before moving into product design full-time, I ran a freelance studio for seven years across web design and photography — building and sustaining a business independently. I specialise in complex system design, high-fidelity prototyping, and establishing design practice in organisations where none previously existed. I work closely with engineering and product, and I'm as comfortable in a research session or a sprint planning meeting as I am in Figma.

Experience

UX Designer

Next

  • The only designer in Next's warehouse technology division — built the design function from scratch across six product sets, with no prior design presence in that part of the business (Next's ecomm division has its own separate design team).
  • Established the company's first structured user research practice: designed the methodology, ran 150+ moderated sessions, and built a 150+ participant database, lifting satisfaction from 38% to 81%.
  • Identified fragmented components as the highest-leverage structural problem; proposed and led a design system built in Blazor, forming a cross-functional team of 10 developers to own and scale it.
  • Shaped product direction across six workstreams — reframing requests from 'build this screen' to 'solve this operation', introducing discovery rituals the product team now runs independently.

Freelance Designer & Photographer

Self-employed

  • Ran a successful independent creative business for seven years across two disciplines — web design and photography — building a sustained client base and generating consistent revenue throughout.
  • Designed and developed client websites end-to-end using Webflow, Framer, and WordPress, handling everything from scoping and brief through to build and launch.
  • Operated a photography practice in parallel, managing the full pipeline from client acquisition and shoot direction through to post-production and delivery.
  • Owned all aspects of the business: pricing, contracts, client relationships, project management, and financial administration.

Design & Marketing Assistant

The Shakespeare Hospice

  • Built brand guidelines from scratch, establishing a consistent visual identity across print and digital.
  • Planned and published content across all social media platforms, growing audience engagement.

Skills & tools

Figma Figma Make Rapid prototyping Design systems User research Complex systems Stakeholder management iOS / mobile design Webflow Framer HTML · CSS · JS AI-assisted design

Education

BA (Hons) Fine Art — 2:1

Central St Martins, UAL

Short courses

AI Design Systems

Memorisely

Presenting With Impact

Next

Scaling Good Services

The School of Good Services

Foundation HTML, CSS & Javascript

SuperHi