Aly Wheale

Product Design Consultant · Design Systems · Enterprise & Data-Dense Products · AI/ML Tooling

Available from mid-September 2026 · 20–30 hrs/wk · consulting engagements or longer contracts Greater Boston, MA · fully remote, US US permanent resident · no sponsorship required

Profile

I consult on the parts of a product that are hard to make simple: design systems, complex search and filtering, compliance workflows and machine-learning tooling. 11 years in enterprise software at HP, Micro Focus and Smarsh, first as a front-end engineer and later leading design. I read the codebase and hand over work engineers can build from.

How I work with clients

  • Design system audit (2 to 4 weeks): Assessing an existing component library, finding the drift, and recommending structure, variants, states and documentation.

  • UX audit of a complex product (1 to 2 weeks): A structured review of search and filtering, dense tables, dashboards, bulk actions and multi-step flows, with prioritised findings.

  • AI/ML tooling interfaces: Model evaluation and comparison, classification review, human-in-the-loop workflows, communicating confidence and error.

  • Embedded design support: Longer part-time engagements alongside front-end teams. Prototypes over specifications.

  • Discovery and concept sprint (about a week): Turning a written requirement or rough idea into wireframes quickly, so teams can argue about something concrete.

Experience

Independent Designer & IllustratorSelf-employed
May 2025 to Present
  • Contract illustration for Derry Comics; scoping, quoting, revision cycles, delivery to deadline.
Senior UX DesignerSmarsh
Feb 2022 to Sep 2024
  • Search redesign (2024): One of the designers on the Enterprise Archive search rebuild. My work covered the single typeahead filter input parsing operators, units and file types into structured filters, editable filter chips, pinnable saved searches, column toggling and result refinement.
  • UX research: Usability sessions and user-group evaluation, plus product analytics in Datadog to map real user journeys and establish which features were used and which were not.
  • ML model evaluation analytics: Interface for comparing up to four model versions across true/false positive and negative rates on communications datasets, with charted summaries and per-message comparison.
  • Review and supervision workflow: Faceted message search, bulk review actions, flagging for violation, privilege and further review.
  • Case management and policy engine: Legal hold, custodians, case states; drag-and-drop policy prioritisation with dependency and short-circuit handling.
  • Design system: Contributed components and variants to the Angular-based Integrated Design System.
Design ConsultantSoho Squared
2019 to 2022, concurrent
  • Speech² speech-analytics platform: Call search with transcript, waveform and sentiment; agent performance dashboards; real-time Agent Assist with sentiment alerts and de-escalation prompts; entity and policy authoring with regex conditions.
  • Agent evaluation and appeals: Scoring forms with regulation-critical questions, review queues and a supervisor appeal workflow. Figma component sets with variants; identity and colour system.
UX Lead / Senior UX DesignerMicro Focus (now OpenText)
2017 to Feb 2022
  • Led design across Digital Safe (private-cloud archiving at scale) and Search Optimiser. Ran a team.
  • Defined the two-stage UX process used inside the development lifecycle, adopted across product teams.
Software Engineer to UX LeadHP / Hewlett Packard Enterprise
2013 to Jan 2017
  • Front-end engineer, later UX lead, on HPE IDOL big-data and machine-learning analytics applications.
  • Designed and shipped the Search Augmentation Tool (successor to Autonomy Business Console), IDOL Answer Bank and Find enterprise search.
Earlier · Leto Lab · ECS STACS · University of Southampton. UI Software Engineer; System Administrator; UX Designer (research contract) · 2011 to 2013