Whakamahi
fah-kah-mah-he
1. (verb) to set to work, cause to work, operate, put to work, employ, use.
The work portfolio of David Hutcheson—
designing tools to be used for jobs to be done.
When asked, I usually refer to myself as an end-to-end customer experience specialist. It’s abstract, but it encompasses my broad interest in how people use websites, software and apps.
My career in tech began in a web agency, building websites and running digital marketing campaigns. Over time, I came to realise that most smaller businesses focus only on funnelling users towards a point of conversion—a sign-up, or a sale—neglecting the nurturing and retention that followed. Seeing an opportunity here, I started my business, Voice & Tone, setting up customer support systems, building great teams and optimizing for customer satisfaction. However, the true value of a strong support system is not just to effectively react to product errors, but to gather data and inform product improvements.
My ‘awakening’ as an experience designer happened while sitting in a doctors office, where I observed a nurse trying to explain to an elderly couple how to use the clinics online portal to renew medication prescriptions. Despite the technological barrier that would not be passed, this was the user journey, and she offered no alternative solution. This experience really hit home the cost of our ongoing attempt to digitise the world, and motivates me to position myself in a way that I can influence these changes.
As I shifted my focus towards user research and UX design, I’ve been able to close the experience loop (end-to-end): to attract and convert, support and retain, and then inform and iterate so it’s done better the next time round.
I am fascinated by how people interface with technology and the ever-evolving relationship we have with our tools. Importantly, I’m interested in the assumptions that we make when building digital products, and how many of those we get wrong. My goal as a product designer is to make apps and software that don’t need a user manual—or Google, Reddit or Youtube—to understand how to operate.
I have been fortunate to work with many amazing businesses, across the United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Australia & New Zealand.
I evangelize the values of remote, allowing me to work from my quiet town in the Waikato, New Zealand.
Design Artifacts
A collection of my web and UI design explorations. These concepts typically come as a way to address an issue I've experienced, or when I take inspiration from a great function I've seen elsewhere. Always with a focus on the whakamahi.
Minimal sign up form w/ passphrase tooltip
Split homepage layout
Split homepage, right-side scroll
Dual user-type sign up
Dual navigation bars
Contrast themes
Contrast themes, dark mode
Detailed contact form
Visual information cards
Responsive website with bright elements
App with high visibility elements
Reimagined Game Center widgets
iOS podcast clipper
Apple-themed video production
Steward
Steward is a pioneering fintech company, established to allow everyday people to fund regenerative agriculture businesses across America.
While at Steward I lead the development of their crowdfunding platform—from its very first $5,000 loan, to a fund raising over $15,000,000. Originally a client of mine, I fell in love with their mission and values-driven community, joining the executive team full-time to help bring the product to market.
| Role | Date |
| Head of Product | 2019 - 2022 |
"Hutch has incredible competence related to technology, user experience, product, and communications—which is rare to find in a single individual."
Dan Miller
CEO & Founder, Steward
My challenge was to build a user journey that helps everyday people discover, understand and then lend towards regenerative agriculture projects, in a compliant and accessible manner. As a novel financial product, we had to strike a fine balance between accessibility and adherence to specific legal regulations. Everything from payment processing, to the language we could use, was scrutinized by users and regulators alike.
Communicating complex financial concepts
In order to make offerings available to the broadest audience, we delivered them using regulations with minimal barriers. While increasing their reach, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that users are provided with sufficient information to help their decision making.My strategy for managing information overload was to keep the UX simple on the surface, but allow users to dig deeper when ready. In practice this included; tooltips over any jargon or technical language, accordion menus to house FAQs and project info, and a comprehensive help center with detailed articles, linked-to regularly throughout the process. The result is offering pages that are simple to browse, but sophisticated enough to communicate the important details.
Cross-functional communication
Clarity of messaging was not only necessary with users, but in a diverse team with members from a variety of backgrounds, clear and concise direction is critical.As the product leader, it was my responsibility to articulate tasks and projects so that development efforts were aligned with company goals. Rather than recurring meetings and repeated explanation, I pushed the team towards asynchronous collaboration—writing detailed project briefs, providing regular updates, and maintaining project management systems.
Tasks provided in the user story format
VacayHQ
As a participant in Techstars' 2023 accelerator group, this credit card recommendation platform needed to take their basic beta product and apply UX design principles to make it an attractive, accessible business worth investing in.
I worked with their team to revise the core user flow and help get the product ready for investor pitches.
My work included research, user journey mapping and redesigning the user interface.
| Role | Date |
| UX Designer | 2023 |
Design analysis and competitive research
I began my assessment with a rough design critique, highlighting what does and doesn’t work with the existing layout. This feedback was subjective, but also informed by what I have seen to be successful in previous finance projects. Financial information is particularly sensitive and it’s important to be clear and specific in how we communicate with the users of these products.
While rough, these initial annotations help to frame the conversation and ensures the product team and company leadership achieve a consensus on where to focus our design efforts.
Understanding the bigger picture
While we focussed on designing a core flow to present to investors, the long-term plan for the platform is feature rich. To help contextualize elements, I mapped out a fuller vision for the platform and the likely journey new users would follow.This exercise also helped refine leaderships plans and eliminate redundancies from the product suite.
Refining the recommendation interface
VacayHQ's primary recommendation algorithm is informed by a wide array of user variables. It was critical that this interface was arranged well so that users could make quick adjustments to their choices and get new recommendations. My approach was to apply grouping logic and to streamline question formatting—making it easier for users to identify the variable they want to change, and understand what inputs are required of them.
Using video to communicate design updates to stakeholders asynchronously.