Old Tin Roof

About Me

Hi, I’m Les Cochrane, an expe­ri­enced web devel­oper and designer with great & var­ied skills in inter­ac­tion design, front end devel­op­ment, usabil­ity and accessibility.

I’ve been design­ing & mak­ing web­sites since the heady days of IE3, and have been for­tu­nate enough to have worked with a great range of clients, from small sin­gle per­son busi­nesses, through well known high street e-commerce brands, and quite a few FTSE 100 cor­po­rate giants.

To any team I work with I bring a mix of tech­ni­cal and design skills along with a very pos­i­tive, pro­fes­sional atti­tude.  I’ve been lucky enough to work with some great devel­op­ment teams in the past, and am most com­fort­able work­ing in an Agile envi­ron­ment, help­ing to deliver great prod­ucts rapidly and with excellence.

Skills pro­file

Inter­ac­tion development

Stan­dards com­pli­ant code is at the core of my inter­ac­tion devel­op­ment expe­ri­ence, and hav­ing intro­duced it to a num­ber of devel­op­ment teams, I’m con­fi­dent that any qual­ity design can be turned into a great user experience.

Cod­ing to mod­ern acces­si­bil­ity require­ments, includ­ing ARIA, is also a core part of my devel­op­ment process. I have expe­ri­ence of usabil­ity test­ing labs but under­stand and often imple­ment guer­rilla test­ing to keep bud­get impact to a min­i­mum, encour­aged by a short train­ing course with Steve Krug last summer.

Inter­ac­tion design

With wide rang­ing expe­ri­ence in user cen­tered design processes (UCD), I can turn my hand to sim­ple, focused web sites, as well as large-scale phased design projects.

I’m very capa­ble of pro­duc­ing and guid­ing a com­plete design process includ­ing ini­tial incep­tion and vision­ing, con­cept work­shops, per­sona research & devel­op­ment, basic infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture (IA), page descrip­tion doc­u­men­ta­tion, grey­box­ing & wire­frames, and fleshed out designs with prototypes.

I’m also happy work­ing on my own or as part of a team, with a prac­ticed eye for sim­plic­ity and usability.

Web appli­ca­tion development

Hav­ing built and worked on a num­ber of web appli­ca­tions, includ­ing design­ing and build­ing a Ruby On Rails based secure file trans­fer appli­ca­tion for blue chip clients, I can be a valu­able resource to any devel­op­ment team.

I excel in tak­ing a design from wire­frame incep­tion through to com­plete user inter­face devel­op­ment, whilst work­ing in con­junc­tion with both design and devel­op­ment teams.

With an under­stand­ing of server side tech­nol­ogy, I can bridge the gap between front and back end devel­op­ment, often help­ing to reach a cleaner, quicker res­o­lu­tion to devel­op­ment prob­lems & bugs.