Programming and UX design
UX Design

Over the past few years, I’ve dedicated myself to bridging the gap between a digital product’s appearance and its functionality. This has evolved from building university prototypes to designing global e-learning modules used by hundreds of thousands of people. To further my understanding of UX design, I also completed UX online courses alongside my work experience.

My formal foundation in this area began at university with a major website redesign project. Here I learned to audit failing interfaces and prototype solutions, ultimately leading to a well-received project that earned me a first-degree in Interface Design. At Dynamic, good UX design was essential. Creating accessible and frictionless experiences for a vast global audience solidified how to map intuitive user journeys and minimise cognitive load.
Research-Driven Rebranding

Creating professional websites for clients is another core part of my UX and programming practice. Hopefully you are currently having a good user experience while browsing my Portfolio! An example website I worked on was for the preschool Passo a Passo 2. I started this project by diving directly into the needs of the users and stakeholders:

The Goal

Simplify an overwhelming site to increase inquiries from parents and improve the website’s SEO performance.

The Research

I conducted deep-dive interviews with the owners, asking targeted questions to create a comprehensive map of the website’s considerations, pain points, and main users. Using Figma, I built accurate user personas and design mockups.

The Process

I restructured the information architecture, created the new interface, and rigorously tested the website to ensure it guided users through essential information and facilitated inquiries without friction.

The Result

“We couldn’t be happier, John Lucas blew us away. Our website now looks much more professional and we’re seeing an impressive increase in inquiries from parents. When looking for preschools in our area now we show up as a top result!”

Visit the website here: PassoaPasso2.com.br
Programming
I believe in understanding the code required to bring my designs to life. Beyond a strong foundation in HTML and CSS, I started working with JavaScript.

Using AI as a learning tool and guided by senior developers at work, I learned to use JS for complex problem-solving. A major milestone was writing a custom script that utilised an API to pull live geographic data from user postcodes, feeding it directly into an Articulate Storyline database. Lately, I’ve also been learning GSAP to write custom, high-performance scrolling animations, as the example you see on the left (or below, if you are on mobile).

My drive to learn new tools recently extended into Augmented Reality. For an educational AR project built with Unity and Vuforia, I learned C# specifically for the purposes of the build. I wrote custom scripts and triggers that allowed the program to read physical image targets in the real world, which then flawlessly animated 2D sprite assets on top of them using timelines. This not only kept the application lightweight but proved my ability to quickly adopt new languages to execute complex, research-backed design solutions. See more information about this project here.