Matthew Kehoe leads Ergo’s UX Design team and is usually found collaborating closely with our customers to build clarity and simplicity into digital experiences. With many years of hands-on experience working in agile development teams, Matthew has the technical experience to bridge the gap between design and technology, ensuring the path to business objectives is clear and the user is at the centre of every design. Matthew also has a knack for clean, high-quality visual design work coming from his experience working in both marketing and advertising industries.
Day to day – you’ll find him running design workshops, interviewing users, mentoring junior designers or deep in a friendly debate with his technical colleagues.
What is your role at Ergo and what does a typical day look like for you?
Usually, the day starts with coffee and catching up with my team, I try my best to steer our design projects in the right direction when needed and give creative direction without discouraging my team members own unique creativity.
Usually then I’ll have a meeting with the development team I’m working with that week either a stand-up or sprint planning meeting. It’s my responsibility to be the voice of the user in all our discussions and ensure we have visualisations ready so the team can all get on the same page quickly. I love being part of the back and forth between all these brilliant people, all trying to reach a common objective, it’s really satisfying when you finally deliver a feature, application or product. Depending on the day I might have design workshops, user interviews or meetings with Ergo’s sales team to discuss upcoming opportunities, every day is different.
What challenges have you faced in your role and how have you overcome them?
Sometimes the prototype designs we create for applications, portals, websites don’t hit the mark. This could be for any number of reasons, maybe it’s not what our customer had in mind, maybe during user testing some issues were discovered or maybe what we’ve designed isn’t technically feasible. To be honest, as challenging as this is, this is where the real insights come from. You get an opportunity dive deep into the customers’ expectations, technical constraints or usability issue and start to create a solid foundation for the next iteration. It all leads to better understanding of the design problem and ultimately you deliver a better result.
What have been your proudest achievements while working at Ergo?
I’m very proud of my work on a high-profile, public facing, financial services platform for one of Ergo’s large public sector clients. The platform we built is open to the public and is used every day by people from all walks of life to get government- backed support. This project gave me the privilege to make a positive impact, we took a legacy, overly complex paper based application and completely redesigned it, taking the paper forms and turning them into a logical step-by-step process using UX best practices and user-feedback as our guide.
I’ve been really lucky to work with a fantastic team both on Ergo and client side, if you ask me, it was the deep collaboration and teamwork throughout that was pivotal to our success. Everyone on the team has a voice and all lean on each other for advice and expertise when needed.
The system we’ve created now serves thousands of users every day, having a big impact on Irish industry, it’s really cool that I could make it easier to deliver government support to those who need it most. I’d also like to add that it was nice to see the impact of our work on users within the organisation too. The platform we designed also included a completely bespoke system for managing and processing applications, managing financial processes and giving admins power to dynamically adjust the platform when needed.
This was a complex challenge, but I really enjoyed working closely with the users, bringing their ideas to life and helping them cut through the complexity with simple, logical systems to allow them to get their work done fast with as little frustration as possible. I’ll forever be grateful for the experience I’ve picked up from all the brilliant people I had the pleasure to work with on this project.
