CV – John Slater, UI & UX Designer

Quick overview of me
About me
Experience
Skills
Education & Qualifications
Projects & Hobbies
Contact me

Quick overview of me

My name is John, I am a UX Designer and the founder of Ability Owl, currently working with social housing provider L&Q (previously Trafford Housing Trust). I have previously worked for digital agency Evocus, e-commerce SaaS provider EKM and luxury car company Kahn Design. In these roles, I have worked with Klarna, eBay and PayPal.

I have over 20 years of experience with the majority of that time spent as a UI/UX Designer (Product Designer). I really love creating well-designed, inclusive, user-centred, user-tested and functional digital products. I have great knowledge of making websites accessible (WCAG 2.1) and the values of design inclusivity.

I have extensive knowledge of HTML, CSS and Javascript. I have worked in React, React Native, PHP and ASP (Classic). I have also created my own iOS apps in Objective-C and React Native with one reaching over 25,000 registered users.

I have worked within an agile web development team as the squad designer. I worked closely with the product owner, head of engineering and other squads to develop the product roadmap around customer feedback.

I currently use Figma for designing prototypes, high-fidelity designs and just about everything else.

About me

I am a user interface and user experience designer based in Preston, UK. I have more than twenty years of experience developing my skills in UI and UX design, graphic design and front-end development.

With my solid understanding of web development principles I am able to build thoughtful and intuitive user interfaces putting the user experience first but working within development limitations.

My passion for the design and development industry doesn’t stop when I leave the office, instead it’s driven my curiosity and led me to create products and apps in my own time.

Experience

Over twenty years working with industry-leading companies in luxury car manufacturing, eCommerce SaaS, holiday booking and social housing.

Founder at Ability Owl (2025 – Present)

In 2025 I founded Ability Owl, an accessibility testing tool that helps teams find and fix accessibility issues on their websites. As founder I do everything from product design and development to marketing.

UX Designer at L&Q (2020 – Present)

As UX Designer for L&Q (previously Trafford Housing Trust) I am responsible for understanding and improving customer journeys through our digital services.

I have been involved in designing improvements for most of our brands (Trustcare, Laurus, MyAccount & Limelight) and have made a measurable positive impact on customer interactions with our digital services.

Accessibility has been a considerable focus of mine at L&Q. Our aim is to create digital services that are inclusive and the most important way to do this is to make our products and services usable by everyone regardless of ability. My team and I have achieved this by following WCAG 2.1 standards, applying user testing and providing training to other teams.

You can read about some of the UX projects I worked on at L&Q:

For access to password-protected articles please contact me.

Lead UI/UX Designer at Evocus (2019 – 2020)

As Lead UI/UX Designer at Evocus (SharpeVu Ltd) I was responsible for creating beautiful, usable and enjoyable interfaces for our clients. My work here included designing and implementing a from-scratch holiday booking system for Harrison Holidays, a prominent holiday company in the UK.

Lead UI Designer at EKM (2008 – 2019)

As Lead User Interface Designer (Product Designer) at EKM I was responsible for taking ownership of all product design on EKM (ecommerce platform), EKM Email Marketing, EKM Web Statistics and EKM Live Chat.

I ensured that new projects conformed to the same high standards and followed our in-house design system and design guide (the UIFW) to ensure a consistent user experience.

You can read about some of the UX projects I worked on at EKM:

Before January 2013 I worked at EKM as a Senior Web Designer building bespoke ecommerce websites for EKM clients.

Web Designer at Kahn Design (2007-2008)

As a Web Designer at Kahn Design I was responsible for design, development and ongoing maintenance of the in-house websites including Project Kahn, Kahn Landmark and Kahn Timepieces.

Skills

Design & research

UI/UX design
User testing through moderated and unmoderated sessions (both group and one-to-one, in-person and online)
Design systems – creating and governing them (I built EKM’s UIFW)
Customer journey mapping and stakeholder workshop facilitation
Ecommerce conversion rate optimisation
Product design presentation
Producing design rationale and requirements documents
Working in an Agile team (including SCRUM)

Accessibility

WCAG 2.2 auditing – manual checks against the success criteria plus automated tooling
European Accessibility Act (EAA) compliance assessment
Screen reader and keyboard-only testing
Accessible component patterns (ARIA) and inclusive design

AI & analytics

Agentic coding – directing, reviewing and testing AI-implemented work
Product analytics – instrumenting products and acting on behavioural data
AI search optimisation (GEO) – llms.txt, markdown variants and citable content
AI-assisted prototyping and image generation workflows

Engineering

Extensive knowledge of HTML, modern CSS and Javascript
React, Next.js and Tailwind CSS
TypeScript (working knowledge)
Experience designing fully responsive mobile-first websites
Web development with PHP (with MySQL and SQLite)

Some knowledge of…

React Native and NodeJS

Tools & Applications

OS: MacOS / Windows
Editors: VS Code and Claude Code
UI & Web Design: Figma (previously Sketch and Adobe XD)
Graphics: Illustrator
Image Editing: Photoshop
Version Control: Git
Prototyping: Figma (previously Marvel)
Accessibility testing: axe, Lighthouse, VoiceOver and NVDA
Analytics: PostHog, GA4 and Hotjar
CMS: WordPress, WooCommerce, Umbraco and Ghost

Education & Qualifications

[Pass] HND General Computing (2007 – 2009)

While I worked in the industry I enrolled on the HND course to further develop the skills I’d learnt on my A-Level course. The course allowed me to further understand best programming practices, database infrastructure and my development skills in PHP.

CV: John Slater – UI & UX Designer