About Matt Isherwood

Over my career my job title has mostly been that of UX designer, which for a while is what I become known for online. However I’ve always been tinkering with side projects and new ideas. In particular I have an interest in creating and selling products, be they physical or digital (or a bit of both), which I’ve gradually done more and more.

Down the years this website has featured these projects at different times – only for them to disappear as I've moved on. Now I have created the below archive as I think it’s interesting to see my changing areas of focus, the themes I have returned to and remixed, and the interesting failures.

Contact

You can get in touch directly by emailing me here (if you're emailing to ask about a backlink or writing an article for this site I won’t respond as I don’t offer either).

Or if you ever visit where I'm based – the lovely Malmesbury – do let me know and we can say hello. It's a small town but known as the home of a flying monk (about a millennium ago) and Dyson (since the 90s).


Project archive

Cotswold Poster Co (2019-now)

Cotswold Poster Co prints

Print design

This began life in 2018 as Malmesbury Card Co when I created some greeting cards of the town I had just moved to, inspired by vintage travel posters. They proved popular and in mid-2019 I evolved it into Cotswold Poster Co, with an aim to design posters for as many towns and villages in the area as possible. This project has brought together a love of product-creation, traditional graphic design, and UX design in creating an effective online store.

It’s a small but growing business that by the end of 2020 has taken up the majority of my time. I have bootstrapped it myself and it has been in profit since the start of 2020. By early 2023 I have sold over 14,000 products and they’re stocked in several shops. It also aims to be highly sustainable and environmentally beneficial.

Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs (2019)

Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs site screen grab

Website design/build

This was effectively a website built for a client but my first for a charity and more of a passion project. My wife is a trustee of these dinosaur statues that are close to our hearts as both an important scientific and historic landmarks near where we used to live in South East London. With me creating the framework, she has created the content for an in-depth online resource covering everything you need to know about the statues.

UX Design Templates (2018-2023)

UX templates multi pack

Digital products

This was inspired by an article I wrote on Medium/UX Collective about how to write a good user testing report, which went somewhat viral (over 50,000 views). I took reports and documents that I was using in my freelance consulting work and created template versions that I made available to buy, figuring other designers might find them useful. Between 2018-2021 they made over 900 sales before I made them freely available here.

Evidence-Based UX Design Methods (2018, 2020)

Evidence-Based UX Design Methods Kindle book cover

Ebook

This began life in 2016 as a series of free guides about lean research on my website, which I released over several months. In 2018 I combined them into a Kindle book for easier reading. The online guides provided popular with several topping Google for the relevant search results and getting decent traffic. I continued to keep the guides up to date until 2020 when I updated the ebook to a 2nd edition.

Supercharge Your User Research (2018-2019)

Supercharge Your User Research title slide

Workshop

A one-day workshop I taught a few times for the JAM conference. This taught everything I had learned about doing effective user research to a product management audience.

The Evidence-Based Redesign (2018)

Evidence Based Redesign course title

Video course

An attempt at turning my 3 hour data-driven workshop into an online video course with Udemy, built around the evidence-based redesign framework I had developed. I had wanted to do this for a while but creating the actual videos was a lot more work than I expected and not something I particularly enjoyed! It made about 100 sales but got average ratings so I made it free after about 9 months. Over the next five years it was taken by nearly 14,000 people with an average rating of 4.75 stars, before I retired it in 2023 as the information was getting pretty dated.

Designing Ecommerce Websites (2017, 2019)

Designing Ecommerce Websites books

Paperback, ebook, audio book

My first move to create a proper printed book (I hired my friend Nam for book design). This built on learnings from my earlier books to teach guidelines that aimed to be as useful and easy-to-reference as possible. As well as a paperback I also released it on Kindle, PDF, and audiobook and the first edition sold nearly 500 copies and picked up positive reviews.

I improved on it a lot with a second edition (more guidelines, clearer writing, further reading links) and this hit 1,000 sales in 18 months, The Kindle edition has been a bestseller in a few charts, and the book maintains a strong 4.7/5 rating on Amazon.

9 Principles of iPhone App Usability (2016)

iPhone App Usability ebook

Ebook

My second PDF ebook turned something I had just learned (mobile app design) into something for others to learn from. A strong structure means I think it continues to be useful but using lots of screen grabs meant the specifics dated quite quickly. It was only available on my website and didn’t sell many, probably because I otherwise didn’t write much about app design.

Data-Driven UX Design: Metrics (2015)

Data-Driven UX Design Metrics book

Ebook

My first attempt at writing my own ebook, following Nathan Barry’s Authority formula closely with a PDF version and a premium version with videos. It was primarily about how to use Google Analytics in UX design work but in hindsight it wasn’t particularly in-depth, lacked a strong structure, and dated fairly quickly as the software changed. It sold OK for about a year, which encouraged me to think there was potential in this self-publishing idea.

Job: Freelance (2015-2021)

Matt Isherwood logo

UX Consultant

At the beginning of 2015 I set out on my freelance career as a consultant UX designer, working on specific projects for clients. I worked in-house for a few companies but I was able to pick up international clients as well as London-based ones. This enabled me to realise I could be effective remotely and I was fully remote by mid-2017 when I left London to move to countryside life in Malmesbury.

I would research existing sites and run user testing before wireframing new designs. I worked with many exciting growing start-ups as my connections were in this area and I quickly specialised in ecommerce. This deep experience led to work with bigger clients, all the way up to the likes of Jimmy Choo. I wrapped up my consultancy to new clients by the end of 2021 as I move on to growing my own product business.

Essential UX Design for Ecommerce Sites (2014-17)

Workshop title slide

Workshop

My second self-created workshop was this 1.5 hour one providing advice on designing for ecommerce that I also taught 17 times. This evolved a lot over the years as my thinking did and as I wrote my ecommerce book. In the end only one or two slides remained from how I first taught it.

I was also twice the lead instructor on General Assembly’s 12-week part-time UX design course in 2015/16.

Data-Driven UX Design on a Budget (2013-17)

Workshop title slide

Workshop

The first bit of teaching I did was with General Assembly when they first launched in London and it took the form of this 3 hour workshop I created. It started off being mainly about analytics but I got less comfortable with the rigid idea of being ‘data-driven’ so it evolved to be as much about qualitative forms of research. I taught it 17 times in total. It went on to be developed into my evidence-based guides.

Flickographics (2012-15)

Back to the Future infographic

Infographics

These were experiments into fun/less serious uses of infographics by theming them around the movies – they still live on this site. Friends and colleagues enjoyed them and the Lord of the Rings Fellowship route still gets quite a lot of traffic.

My Free Bingo Cards (2012-now)

myfreebingocards screenshots

Website design (collaboration)

This started off with doing a logo and web design for a friend who created this site to provide printable PDF bingo cards. I have gone on to design several new features and evolved the flow of the site to incorporate virtual bingo. It has grown and grown over the years, and has been impressively popular during 2020’s global coronavirus lockdowns.

Prodcraft (2013-15)

Email newsletter & events (collaboration)

Whilst at onefinestay myself and the Head of Product created small events to help us explore what the role of Product Manager actually entailed. We did about five of these ‘fireside chat’ style evenings with other PMs and titled them Prodcraft. The brand lived on for a couple of years as an email newsletter where I curated five interesting product-related articles every week and it got about 350 subscribers from London start-up folk.

Christmas Cards (2012-15)

Christmas cards

Card design

I designed my own Christmas cards for four years, each year with a different theme. It was nothing particularly special but the idea of designing greeting cards would be something I would return to.

Job: onefinestay (2011-15)

onefinestay logo

UX Designer/Product Manager

At the end of 2011 I left the BBC with an aim to get involved in the exciting start-up scene that was emerging in East London. I got a job with onefinestay, a kind of high-end Airbnb and who were about 30 people at the time. I was part of some rapid growth as by the time I left there were over 300 staff and they had offices in Paris, New York, and LA.

I started as a UX designer and my responsibilities grew to be the Product Manager of the front-end website, which was where I began accumulating ecommerce knowledge. I bridged the marketing and tech teams and it was an incredible learning opportunity to work alongside some very smart people.

Fanroom (2011-17)

Fanroom website

Website design (collaboration)

A solid idea that solved a need for me and a couple of friends – an online database of pubs in the UK that showed live football. It got good traffic during 2012 and 2014 international tournaments and made a bit of money from ads but never really had the potential to be anything too big.

The Football Ramble Website (2010-19)

Mid-2010s Football Ramble site

Website design/build & infographics

They began as a freelance client but became a lot more as I made 5 or 6 redesigns of the site for this very popular football podcast over the course of a decade. I also regularly added and removed various sections as it rapidly changed (including short-lived things like Pete’s Friday Club). Creating these sites pushed my coding knowledge a lot. At one point I would also publish my own weekly football infographics on there. I got to know the lads well and even accompanied them to Kiev for Euro 2012.

BBC WS Sport Visualisations (2010)

World Service football cricket data modules

Interactive infographics (collaboration)

A side project created with a colleague at BBC World Service. It solved the problem of them not having any live footage or text commentary for the 2010 football World Cup by using match stats data to give a picture of a game. It went on to be used by some language services for Premier League matches the following season too and we created something similar for the cricket too.

A-Z of London Dating (2010-12)

London A-Z map and pics

Blog (collaboration)

A fun idea that I did with my girlfriend (now wife) for about a 18 months to help us explore some of the less known parts of this big city. This blog featured descriptions and ratings of our dates in a different part of London beginning with each letter of the alphabet.

WebGun (2009-10)

WebGun podcast logo

Podcast (collaboration)

A podcast about cool/interesting/weird stuff that my co-host (a fellow BBC UX designer) Chris and I found on the web. It was recorded after-hours in BBC meeting rooms and only got a few listeners, but we had fun using our colleagues as guests, and we were doing it well ahead of the podcast boom. I built the website for it which was my first use of the ExpressionEngine CMS – something I’ve used ever since.

Job: BBC (2008-11)

BBC logo

UX Trainee/UX Designer

I moved to London in 2008 for a year of being a trainee UX designer – a job that catapulted me into a career of designing for the web. I spent that first year moving around a few teams and it was an amazing place to learn user-centred design in what must have then been the UK’s largest team of UX designers and IAs.

I then got a full time position at the World Service, where I worked on developing news sites for different languages and got to work with an array of talented folk from around the world. The whole three years was a great grounding in how to design high quality, usable digital products.

A T-Shirt Everyday (2008)

A T-Shirt Everyday designs

Apparel designs

Homemade hand stencilled and printed t-shirts. I made about 30 of them over a summer, with the high concept approach of releasing a new one each weekday, and managed to sell about half. The idea was very limited as I wasn’t making them in different sizes! It was my first go with (very early) Shopify and a foray into ecommerce – something I would come back to in a much bigger way.

Soup (2006)

Soup Collective logos

Design collective (collaboration)

This post-uni collective of designers existed very briefly as we only did a couple of projects under that banner. However we did a lot of work around the practicalities of freelancing and working with clients, which resulted in some useful documents and guidelines.

–=+ (2005-06)

minusequalsplus magazines

Magazine & website (collaboration)

My first foray into sustainability-focussed design and something that taught me a lot about creating printed products and web design. This started as a second-year university magazine project promoting environmentally-friendly living but encompassed so much more. We also spent a day promoting Buy Nothing Day (getting us featured on Adbusters) amongst other bits of activism and ran a club night to raise funds for the printing of the mag. We developed a funky website and involved journalism students to create a bigger second edition.