Adam Who?
Hey, I’m Adam Kennedy-Newton, a Lead Product Designer based in Berlin, Germany with 12+ years of experience shaping user-centered digital solutions from early-stage concepts to polished products.
I started out playing around with Photoshop and Dreamweaver back in 2004 and I’ve done my time in various industries ever since. I’m currently at NewStore, where I design innovative retail solutions across desktop and mobile platforms.
I’m always up for a chat about design, music (I’m a drummer), bikes and tech ✌️
Work
A small selection of what I’ve been working on lately. I can’t share most of the juicy stuff publicly but I’m happy to walk you through my case studies and portfolio on a call.
Runner
"John! I need these in a size 10, NOW!" (Shouting)
Runner streamlines the way that products are brought to customers from the stock room, directly resulting in more sales and less walkouts.
Have you ever bought a pair of shoes in a store? The pair that you want to try on is hardly ever available on the sales floor. There’s this whole process of back and forth just to get you the product that you might buy. You’ve probably seen the walkie talkies or even experienced your sales associate disappearing for 5 minutes before coming back with an “alternative” because they couldn’t find your size.
Runner was born off the back of talking to retailers who wanted to speed up that process and make it more accurate. I replaced walkie talkies and shouting, yes shouting to each other from the sales floor with an elegant in app solution that enables associates to stay with their customers and receive the goods quicker than ever.
For a full detailed case study just reach out, I’d love to walk you through my process of initial discovery, visiting retailers in person, prototyping with my team and actually building the feature.
Reservations
"I'll come back later" - Spoiler, they actually will
Reservations allows customers to, you guessed it, reserve items from a store so that they can come back and purchase them at a later date.
Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it? But did you ever think about what happens to the stock movements behind the scenes? How long Retailer X wants their items to be reserved for vs Retailer Y? How the customer kept up to date throughout the process? What happens when the reservation expires?
This one went a lot deeper than even I thought it would.
Scan Mate
"I'll help you scan that, mate"
How do you prototype complex features such as scanning without having to build them?
This was a very real problem that I was facing. A few of the features that I was working on had scanning as an integral part of their functionality. Unfortunately Figma doesn’t really let you put real world interactions like scanning into your designs.
This is where Lovable came in. With Lovable I was able to build a working prototype that scanned barcodes and captured the data as well as how many times they had been scanned. With this I was able to play around with different scan types (single, continuous), scanning speeds, audio and haptic feedback and then get my users to try it out directly and tell me how the scanning experience actually FEELS, not just looks.
User Led Comparison
navigating the analysis paralysis
Ladenzeile had an ambitious goal: become the number one trusted comparison platform across all verticals. The catch? Our product only really served the “I know exactly what I want” user. The other group, the “I’m just browsing, and hoping to see something I like” user was resorting to an awful workflow: bouncing between a thousand tabs, wishlists, and shopping carts to compare products. This chaos was costing us trust and conversions.
I took full ownership to design and deliver the User Led Comparison feature. My job was to take three disparate shopping behaviors, collecting, comparing and deciding and synthesise them into one seamless product experience.
Various AI Explorations 🤖
Yeah, I got the bug too
I’ll be honest I was initially pretty hesitant to adopt AI in my professional life but once it started to mature I basically went all in.
Nowadays it’s an intregral part of my day to day workflows. I am especially a big fan of complex prototyping with tools such as Lovable and Bolt. Have you ever tried to prototype a feature that contains a table with a few filters? Nightmare.
These products allow you to create prototypes that actually work, that your users can actually try out for real, no more “oh sorry that button doesn’t work, maybe try another?”.
Here’s a few examples of vibe-coding prototypes I’ve made just for fun.
Pulse
Pulse is an advanced prototype built using Bolt.new to explore the future of retail operations.
Managing a store, let alone a whole store network is often a Frankenstein of software products, whiteboards, team chats / phone calls and a whole host of other formats (trust me I’ve seen it!).
To approach this problem I designed this advanced proof-of-concept to synthesise an entire team’s operational life into one elegant experience.
S1E1
I’d had this idea for years, a site that evaluates TV shows based on their pilot episode. The best bit of this project was that it was a great baseline for exploring public API’s. A lot of my previous projects didn’t really feel alive as I had no data to fill them with. With S1E1 I leveraged an API that has a load of TV show info including reviews and cover art etc.