About Andy McClelland
Senior Product Designer based in Belfast, focused on creating strategic, scalable, and AI-informed product solutions.
I’ve been working in design for over 15 years, with a background that spans branding, digital design, UX strategy, and product thinking. Over the past seven years, I’ve focused on enterprise-level SaaS products, with an emphasis on user research, system design, and cross-functional collaboration. More recently, I’ve embedded AI-first thinking into my daily workflows, discovery practices, and solution design.
I work closely with product managers, engineers, customers, and stakeholders to solve complex problems through clear design thinking, strategic insight, and a deep focus on user needs. My experience includes leading product initiatives, mentoring designers, and delivering solutions that drive measurable outcomes and meaningful business impact.
What I’m doing currently:
I collaborate with four engineering teams, four product owners, and senior leadership, including product managers and the Director of Hospital Products. My role also extends to ESO’s Hospital vertical, where I contribute to the development of Health Data Exchange products, effectively balancing multiple priorities across cross-functional teams, ensuring alignment across all stakeholders to deliver impactful results.
Beyond my design responsibilities, I take pride in mentoring three talented designers and co-leading our product design team under the guidance of the Director of UX. I facilitate weekly syncs, strategy sessions, and workshops, fostering a culture of growth, collaboration, and innovation.
Recently, I was tasked with revamping our design system and spearheading initiatives like Analytics insight education to drive adoption and improve user engagement.
I was also selected as a product representative to engage and develop a core understanding of how AI is changing and shaping the future of product management and delivery. AI plays an important role in my day-to-day process. I use it to explore ideas, structure content, analyse research, and speed up early-stage ideation and prototyping. More importantly, I see AI as a strategic partner when thinking about how we validate opportunities and deliver value to users.
I am actively exploring how generative and agentic AI can support onboarding, suggest insights in real time, enhance documentation, and create more intelligent product experiences. These tools allow us to move faster, think more broadly, and design for a future that puts user needs and product value first.
These efforts have been recognized by senior leadership, as reflected in my inclusion in multiple leadership development programs. These experiences have sharpened my skills in strategic decision-making, team leadership, and cross-functional collaboration, affirming my commitment to growth and positioning me for continued success in my career.
Design Philosophy
I believe that great design is the bridge between user needs and business goals. At its core, design is a problem-solving process—one that requires a balance of empathy, creativity, and strategy to deliver meaningful results. My approach centers on three guiding principles: empathy, collaboration, and continuous iteration.
As a UX designer, the focus must always remain on user needs. As a product designer, I understand that business goals are equally essential. Ultimately, both user and business value must work hand-in-hand to achieve meaningful outcomes, driven by data and resulting in measurable success.
Ultimately, business success is achieved by being user-centric. This alignment is achieved through empathy, collaboration, and continuous iteration, ensuring that every design delivers meaningful impact.
Empathy: Understanding Users
Great design starts with understanding the people we’re designing for. I dive deep into user research, listening to their stories, analyzing their pain points, and identifying opportunities to improve their lives. Whether through interviews, surveys, or observational studies, I strive to uncover the underlying needs and motivations that drive behavior.
Example: During the development of a healthcare workflow for Patient Registry, user research revealed inefficiencies that were increasing staff workload. By empathizing with their challenges, I was able to design a streamlined solution that reduced manual inputs and saved users hours of work weekly. The most recent impact metrics showed results of an increased and improved CES (Customer effort score), a required user task reduction of 61% and a time to task completion reduction of 40%.
Collaboration: Building Together
Design is never done in isolation. I thrive in cross-functional environments, working closely with product managers, engineers, customer experience, success/support teams, and other stakeholders to ensure alignment and shared ownership of the solution. Collaboration and clear communication is the key to creating design solutions that are scalable, feasible, impactful and successful.
Example: When tackling a redesign of our multi-factor authentication process, I partnered with engineering and internal security teams to balance security requirements with usability. This collaboration resulted in a 300% increase in adoption rates, making the solution both secure and user-friendly. Further collaboration with product marketing and support teams ensured that communication both internally and externally was clear, concise and consistent, ensuring users were engaged, educated and empowered to utilize and optimize our latest security offerings.
Continuous Iteration: Refining for Excellence
Design doesn’t stop at launch. I believe in the power of data-driven iteration to refine and improve experiences over time. Leveraging quantitative metrics like adoption rates, CES, and NPS, as well as qualitative feedback, I ensure that each design evolves to meet changing user needs and business goals. Utilizing the power of Pendo analytics integrations, I have helped empower internal teams to gain much needed true impact metrics and user understanding.
Example: For a self-serve onboarding initiative, I used Pendo analytics to track user behavior and identify friction points where help guides and more intuitive user experiences could be implemented to help resolve these blockers for our users. Insights from this data enabled our team to reduce onboarding time by 50%, delivering a more seamless experience for users, allowing them to onboard faster with more knowledgeable understanding of requirements and greater accuracy of data. From a business point of view, it not only increased revenue by allowing users to start using the products earlier but also reduced the time required from our onboarding coordinators to manually assist user onboarding, increase speed to revenue generation and reducing internal costs.
Design in Action: How I Deliver
My design process focuses on achieving tangible outcomes through a structured yet flexible framework: Discover, Define, Design, and Deliver. These phases ensure that every project is grounded in real user insights and driven by clear goals with strong analysis to ensure success. Here’s how I bring this philosophy to life:
Discover
Build empathy by engaging with users through research, uncovering pain points and opportunities.
- Conduct user and market research to uncover pain points and identify opportunities.
- Gather qualitative and quantitative insights through interviews, surveys, and analytics.
- Perform system and workflow analysis to map current vs. ideal user experiences.
- Facilitate stakeholder workshops to align objectives and gather domain knowledge.
- Deliver comprehensive insight reports to inform the next phase.
Define
Synthesize findings into actionable problem statements and goals, aligning stakeholders around a shared vision.
- Synthesize findings into problem statements and actionable goals.
- Align teams by creating personas, journey maps, and value propositions.
- Develop user stories that articulate user needs and technical requirements.
- Prioritize solutions through collaborative roadmapping with stakeholders.
- Establish success metrics to measure the impact of design decisions.
Design
Ideate and prototype solutions, iterating based on feedback to deliver intuitive, user-centric designs.
- Ideate and prototype user-centric solutions, incorporating user feedback at each stage.
- Create low- to high-fidelity wireframes for stakeholder and user validation.
- Develop interactive prototypes to test usability and refine flows.
- Apply design systems and reusable components to ensure scalability and consistency.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams for design feasibility and technical alignment.
Deliver
Collaborate with engineering to implement designs effectively, measure success, and iterate for improvement.
- Finalize UI designs with an emphasis on accessibility, scalability, and usability.
- Standardize and document designs within a comprehensive design system.
- Ensure accurate implementation through collaboration with engineering and testing.
- Measure design success using metrics like adoption rates, CES, and NPS.
- Iterate on designs based on post-launch analytics and user feedback.