Hello my name is Sorcha
I am a full stack service designer with over 15 years experience in product design. This includes leading design for 2 of world’s largest poker sites.
I have experience in all facets of design including User Experience Design, User Research & UCD, through IA, IxD, UI design, prototyping, to user & usability testing. However 15 years in product based environments has taught me there is more to design than just acronyms.
I really enjoy design & feel very lucky to be doing this for a living. I have a huge appreciation for the benefits of working with teams & enjoy the process of design as a collaboration. I believe design has the potential to harness excitement & motivation from from across the organisation & to include all teams involved in product development, building buy-in & stake throughout the process.
To hire me get in touch.
Crypto Native Poker
There are many synergies between the worlds of online poker and crypto trading. This is the story of my experience designing and building a crypto native, e-sports inspired poker app from blank page to proof of concept beta build.
Designing For Crypto
There’s more to crypto UX than crypto features and the challenges to product design are more than presenting “just another currency”. To understand how cryptocurrencies can impact a multitude of areas across product development, check out my Designing for Cryptocurrency case study.
Infectious Disease Surveillance
This is the story of the work I completed on a National Tuberculosis Surveillance System – a project combining Public Health England, NHS & Softwire, a design agency.
Designing Digital Services For Government
Working within the public sector is not without its challenges, but it can also offer a designer valuable exposure to design processes & resources not readily available in the commercial sector. My experience was a valuable lesson in scaling a system of design across a fragmented & silo-ed organisation with the unique design challenge of targeting an audience en mass, in complex flow to a high level of usability & accessibility.
Global Payment Processing
Full Tilt Poker was the world’s 2nd largest poker site up to 2011. At one time the site was processing up to $1 million per day. Here is the story of how I led the UX design for payment processing. This work resulted in resulted in some of the highest seen success rates for merchants with over 64% reduction in deposit failures.
HealthTech App Ideation, Design & Build
Knowsley Health Hub was a hyperlocal health app for iOS & Android delivering health engagement to a localised population in Knowsley, Merseyside. This is the story of how I used UCD to fuel the concept, secured funding & manged the build of the app.
Nielsen Rated World’s Stickiest Site
At its peak the Full Tilt Poker site supported an average of 38k daily visitors, with Nielsen ranking it as the world’s stickiest brand in April 2009 with 1.4 million visitors. Here is the story of how I led the UX design on a site redesign resulting in a 29% increase in conversion.
Social Games - Facebook
Learning to get comfortable working blind, formulating unverified hypotheses & taking chances on leap-like end user assumptions is an important part of a designer’s work. This project tells the story of such a design developed truly lean & agile for PokerStars.
If you need something done right, with a fast turnaround, Sorcha brings it everytime. Working as part of the Torafugu Tech team is not for the faint hearted, often requiring to bridge the worlds of data science, software engineering, gamification, commercial and medical, and she thrived. Sorcha will find a way to weather any storm with a smile. She asks relevant questions and leaves no stone unturned to produce a great product! Certainly someone I’d want to to have on my team. 
Savvas Neophytou
Partner at Deepbridge Capital LLP
I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Sorcha for the past 10 years. Sorcha is dedicated, self-motivated, methodical, and very capable. She was well respected in our department and everyone enjoyed working with her. Whenever I had a problem, there has never been a time she has left me without a solution. Through the years, we worked on various projects and I have consistently been impressed by her positive attitude and ability to get things done. She most definitely thrives in a fast-paced environment.
Adrian McMahon
Head Of Operations at Segala
Sorcha is one of the best designers I have had the pleasure of working with. She brings a rare mix of both creative and technical excellence to her work. Her technical background enables her to communicate design concepts to technical teams, but also to breakdown complex technical concepts to non technical audiences.
Catherine O’Sullivan
Founder & Software Developer at Aspire & Conquer
I worked alongside Sorcha for 3 years at Full Tilt Poker, where our teams collaborated closely on delivering some of the most innovative products in online gaming. The scale and pace of the workload at Full Tilt Poker was often incredibly challenging, and I was consistently impressed with Sorcha’s ability to find inventive solutions to UI and UX problems, as well as her ability to work in co-operation with designers from across other disciplines.Whether working as part of cross-functional teams or self-directed, Sorcha always showed enthusiasm, resourcefulness, expertise and – above all – a positive attitude to challenges. She was an absolute pleasure to work with.
Karl Bray
Head of Brand at Full Tilt Poker