Photo of Mike Barker standing in front of Apple Park, Cupertino, California

Hello, I'm Mike Barker, a senior designer & developer.

Featured design work

MEC Mobile UX design (2023-24)

I crafted a mobile design strategy at MEC and delivered mobile experience improvements.

As senior UX/UI designer, I focused on the mobile experience, both with the current web experience and future mobile design strategy. I conducted user interviews to observe customer behaviour with an eye to understand broader mobile trends. Additionally I delivered feature improvements for web with an eye to the in-store experience.

lululemon Web & app UX design (2022)

I helped reduce dead-end online shopping experiences for out of stock products at lululemon

Adding Back in Stock notifications to the lululemon website and mobile app was the result of a six month project to identify the best and most practical way of communicating restock availability to our guests. Working with user research and the product owner, we used a discovery phase to understand the problem space, craft a vision, and explore solutions before moving on to the concept & validation phase, and the eventual design and development implementation.

Canadian Tire Mobile UX design (2017-19)

At Canadian Tire, I brought stakeholders together to collaborate with design sprints on a customer-centric mobile app redesign

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I joined Canadian Tire in 2017 and began working on customer and employee web & mobile apps, including the ground-up reinvention of the core ecommerce app. From day one we took a customer-centric approach starting with user research and validating solutions with weekly usability tests. This was one reason we raised our App Store rating to 4.7-stars from below 3-stars.

Refash UX design (2016-17)

I worked on a team that took a new approach to retaining customers on a fashion rewards platform

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Refash was an opportunity to start from the beginning in building a rewards platform. We made two decisions early in our process—we used lean user research and Theory of Change to identify a shortcoming with previous products. The result was a fashion inspiration app which rewarded customer's purchases through the platform, and lveraged buyable looks within Instagram. This solved two problems existing with Instagram fashion posts—the inability to purchase items in a look, and creating a product customers would return to more frequently.

Current side project

I'm reviving my third-wave coffee finding app Dew with a whole new approach and improved web experience

Since the advent of SwiftUI I have been looking to build an all-new app. On the web, front-end frameworks have progressed greatly with Next.js rising in popularity. Dew 2 is feeding these opportunities to learn something new. I also needed to refresh the brand and find a new modern design language.

More coming soon...