Shannon Murdoch.

About

Curious, logic-driven, and still hands on the tools.

Twenty years across design and engineering. Eleven of them leading product design; ten-plus of them writing production code.

I’ve been the first UX hire (at Webjet.com.au) and grown that function to six people across three countries. I’ve leveraged AI to plan, prototype, and build an extensive industry reviews platform. I’ve mentored designers, developers, and founders. My north star is validating that we’re creating valuable, frictionless products.

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Shannon Murdoch

What you’re getting

Four things I’d want to know if I were hiring me.

I lead with research and data

Capturing and analysing user feedback and behavioural data is critical for product decision making. I've implemented user action eventing & session replay capture, worked with internal analytics teams, and established a remote usability research practice spanning 1,000+ participants a year against major initiatives.

I engage with engineers as a peer

Ten-plus years shipping production code means I know what's feasible and what's a stretch. I know firsthand what AI agents can accelerate. I’ve architected & launched a full-stack B2B reviews platform, founded a UI pattern library, argued a specialist dev team into existence, and resolved high-friction designer–developer handover processes.

I'm commercially focused

I ensure prioritisation, resourcing & tool spend delivers measurable value to the business. I've managed the UX budget within an ASX200 listed company and ran financial operations for three startups.

I have a structured approach

British Design Council's Double Diamond method for scoping and delivering de-risked projects; divergent thinking & research is protected from convergent critique.

Stefan Klocek’s Hierarchy of Effort to sequence change in organisations that aren’t ready for user-driven product practice yet.

Sachin Rekhi's Product-Market Fit Hypothesis and various other product management frameworks from Reforge Academy.

Career highlights

Where I’ve worked and what changed.

  1. Apr 2025 – presentRemote, AU

    Solo founder, designer & engineer

    Web3Connect.com · B2B reviews & recommendations marketplace

    Designed, built & launched a B2B reviews platform solo — leveraging Agentic AI to accelerate research, specs/PRD, prototypes, engineering/build, and content creation. Scope included a public marketplace, review submission flow, adaptive user dashboard, admin backoffice and a lifecycle email system.

    • Design system in code before any UI mockups – one shared component package consumed by all four apps, readable by the AI Agent engineer
    • Adaptive user dashboard changes based on user archetype and tier (seeker / reviewer / partner, free vs paid); behavioural tagging during registration pathway changes downstream messaging and recommended next-best actions
    • Shipped LLM-readable content variants (all pages available as HTML & markdown) – /llms.txt index, token-budget headers – consciously crafting information density for agents the way visual hierarchy works for humans
    • PostHog session replay and custom events used to find confusion points; prioritised UX improvements leading to less downstream admin and more customer autonomy
    • Scoped & delivered post-launch enhancements progressively including content warm-up (procedurally caching 10,000's of pages after deployment to deliver sub-second loading of directory pages), back-office enhancements to automate partner profile creation using AI agents from a source website URL, and A/B tested Customer.io email sequences (journeys) to improve activation.
    Next.js 16TypeScriptTailwind v4shadcn/uiPrismaPostHogCustomer.ioClaude Code
  2. Jan 2015 – Apr 20216 yrs 4 mos

    User Experience Manager

    Webjet · ASX:WEB · market cap $200M → $2B during tenure

    First UX hire. Grew the function to six designers across Dubai, Auckland and Australia while continuing to design the highest-impact interfaces myself.

    • Re-designed every pre- and post-purchase interface across flights, hotels, packages and car hire — responsive web plus native iOS and Android
    • Led numerous flight purchase-path retrofits and overhauls end to end: research, design, prototyping, testing, rollout.
    • Championed and designed the flight price heatmap (date picker), including the four-colour cheap/expensive algorithm — heavily prototyped and tested before build
    • Founded the organisation’s first UI Pattern Library across web and native; integrated adoption into approved in-flight work with Product Owners and squad BAs
    • Established organisation-wide Design Principles drawn from user research, used as the criteria for product trade-off decisions
    • Built the remote usability research practice: 1,000+ participants a year; negotiated the annual contract, saving $100–200k+ against default renewal pricing
    • Partnered with Analytics to instrument event tracking; step drop-off became a primary input to prioritisation. BigQuery + Tableau for behaviour at scale
    • Hired and mentored four designers
    • Turned the team into an innovation unit — a standing ‘shopping list’ of enhancements that stakeholders pulled into production
    UserTesting.comSketchFigmaBigQueryTableau
  3. May 2023 – Apr 20252 yrs

    Co-founder & COO (acting CTO)

    Eclipse Fi · DeFi launchpad infrastructure · $3M USD raise

    Fully remote across Singapore, Ukraine, Indonesia, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Australia. Design judgement carried alongside financial control and acting-CTO responsibility for five engineers.

    • Guided our contract UX designer through the early product surface; ran design reviews twice weekly
    • Resolved conflicts between design and engineering: introduced a signed-off / in-progress workflow with per-product Figma indexes to avoid developers picking up unapproved work, plus twice-weekly UX–front-end stand-ups so developer input shaped work
    • Designed a live public-sale fundraising dashboard pulling directly from on-chain RPCs (showing granualar participation details), and customer-retention Sankey flows tracking repeat participation across platform raises
    FigmaDesign opsData vizRunway management
  4. Nov 2020 – Jun 20221 yr 8 mos

    Portfolio Manager / COO

    LVT Capital · family office VC firm

    • Designed and built a market-data aggregation and visualisation system used to surface investment opportunities
    • Portfolio constitution and vesting-horizon dashboards
  5. Nov 2004 – May 20149 yrs 7 mos

    First web developer, later UX-led full-stack

    Enigma Communications / XO Digital · agency

    First developer hired. Shipped 200+ websites over ten years for clients including McDonald Jones Homes, Landcom (NSW Government), Hunter TAFE, Newcastle Building Society and Pacific Dunes.

    • Design degree plus coding fluency made me the bridge between a print-trained studio and the client: scoping, sitemaps, content plans, requirements workshops, technical quoting
    • Migrated the agency off my own proprietary CMS onto mature open-source platforms; wrote provisioning and deployment automation
    • Mentored the studio on web constraints, hired & mentored developers, trained account managers — grew the in-house team to five
  6. Feb 2003 – Nov 20041 yr 10 mos

    Lecturer

    University of Newcastle · graphic design & interactive media

    Lectured and tutored final-year and honours design students. Bachelor of Design (Visual Communication), University of Newcastle, 2002.

Skills & tooling

The stack a best-in-class product org actually runs on.

Bold means I’ve used it on shipped work; the rest I can pick up on day one. AI is emerging at every stage now – not just prototyping – from feedback synthesis to shipped code.

Discover & research

  • UserTesting.com – unmoderated remote studies at volume
  • Task & scenario design, moderated interviews
  • PostHog session replay + custom events
  • Maze, Sprig, Hotjar, Lookback
  • Dovetail, Enterpret – tagging, atomic research & AI-assisted theming across support / sales / community
  • Support & CS ticket mining, Chatwoot / Intercom / Zendesk / Gong call intelligence
  • Competitor & heuristic audits, UI inventories

Define & align

  • UX Double Diamond method, Stefan Klocek's Hierarchy of Effort for UX maturity resourcing
  • Journey maps, service blueprints, JTBD
  • Markdown PRDs for AI agent ingestion
  • Notion, Confluence, Miro, FigJam
  • Stakeholder workshops & buy-in strategy
  • Cycle – aggregating raw feedback to a roadmapped decision
  • Slack – async RFC threads & critique

Design & systems

  • Figma – variables, auto-layout, component APIs, dev mode
  • Design tokens & multi-brand theming – Tokens Studio, Style Dictionary, W3C DTCG format
  • shadcn/ui + Tailwind v4, Radix primitives
  • Storybook, component documentation
  • Design system governance – ownership, contribution, adoption
  • Accessibility – WCAG AA, contrast, touch targets, keyboard order
  • Sketch (historic)

Prototype & generate

  • Figma prototyping – flow-complete, testable
  • Figma Make & Claude Design — prompt-to-prototype grounded in the actual token/component library
  • Claude Code — AI-orchestrated implementation under design rails
  • v0, Framer; InVision (historic)
  • Coded prototypes when feasibility is the question

Build & ship

  • AI Agent development – task-specific skills, codeified standards/conventions, workflows, constrained context, hooks, sub-agents, commands / shortcuts – all markdown
  • Next.js, React, TypeScript – various frameworks & languages
  • HTML / CSS to production standard
  • PostgreSQL, Prisma – and other databases / abstraction layers
  • Git, GitHub Actions, Cloudflare, Railway – and other deployment, hosting & security layers
  • Linear, Jira, Azure DevOps – for backlog management

Measure & iterate

  • Event instrumentation – shipped early and with any significant interface change
  • PostHog, GA4, Amplitude, Mixpanel
  • Funnel & step drop-off analysis feeding prioritisation
  • A/B and multivariate testing
  • Customer.io lifecycle messaging & behavioural variants
  • Conversion attribution to design change
  • HEART framework, SEQ & UMUX-Lite

Currently researching

  • The agent as a user. When an LLM is the visitor, information density and structure are the new visual hierarchy. Markdown routes, token budgeting, machine-readable indexes.
  • AI-orchestrated delivery with rails. How to encode conventions and accessibility rules as rails an agent can’t drift out of.
  • Design systems that are the source of truth in code, not a Figma library that drifts from it.
  • Qualitative signal from replay at scale — finding confusion without waiting for a scheduled study.

Where my thinking comes from

  • Nielsen Norman’s usability heuristics — consistency and standards especially, the ones organisations break first
  • Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think — “people don’t read, they scan”. Testing has proved this to me more times than I’d like
  • Stefan Klocek’s Hierarchy of Effort — how to mature an organisation that isn’t ready for user-centred design yet
  • British Design Council’s Double Diamond — because separating divergent from convergent thinking is what stops good ideas being killed young

Outside work

How I balance work.

Pickleball & Tennis

I'm the Secretary of my local Club, run inter-town competitions, run children's pickleball sessions, and have won regional Pickleball competitions.

Snow & water sports

I live by a lake and try to get to the snow yearly.

Emerging-tech rabbit holes

AI agents since it became obvious they were going to change how products get built, Blockchain since 2017.

Teaching

I lectured design before I practised it professionally, and mentoring is still the part of leading a team I’d least want to give up.

In other people’s words

The mentoring part, mostly.

More on the homepage, including from Webjet’s COO and both CTOs.

  • You saw the the determined young designer I was.

    “You are by far the best manager and colleague I have had the pleasure of working alongside – always allowing me to flourish and grow into the confident, well spoken person I am today. I wouldn’t be this confident stepping up without your unwavering guidance.”

  • Webjet has evolved a great user experience driven by your fantastic approach.

    “Loved working with you – bouncing off ideas, and loved your great solutions to bring products to life. Webjet has certainly evolved with a great user experience driven by your fantastic approach.”

  • It’s been incredible to watch UX grow over that time.

    “I remember when you started at Webjet, and it’s been incredible to watch UX grow and develop over that time. I have learnt lots from you along the way – thank you for always taking the time. You should be really proud of all that you have accomplished.”

  • A great source of knowledge and support in the UX world.

    “Thanks for being such a great source of knowledge and support in the UX world over the last few years – I’ve really enjoyed all the projects we’ve worked together on.”

  • Exemplary at creating, refining and implementing efficient processes.

    “Shannon has a keen eye for detail and is exemplary at creating, refining and implementing efficient processes that are beneficial in time, effort and employee satisfaction. Shannon is also great with clients and has insight into making web technologies accessible for people of all backgrounds.”

  • A most capable and professional practitioner and educator.

    “Shannon Murdoch is a most capable and professional practitioner and educator. I would strongly recommend Shannon as an individual who can be relied upon to deliver high quality professional service.”

    Get in touch

    I'm looking for a full-time, in-house product team that wants to co-build with its customers.

    Senior IC or player-coach. Happy to walk through any project in detail, including what didn’t work. References available.

    What I’m looking for See the work
    Email contact@shannonmurdoch.com LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/smurdoch