About Us

Hawdale Associates is a customer journey design consultancy with expertise in conversion techniques.

David Hawdale

David has degrees in Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science and has spent the last fifteen years experience attempting to understand how customers behave, the journeys they take, and the decisions they make.

He has overseen major design projects with Lloyds TSB Insurance, dabs.com, totesport and laterooms. These projects have always created a return, often spectacular, with ease.

What They Say About David Hawdale:

He has supported my team in the research and implementation of a huge piece of personalisation based on behavioural analysis and psychological type. This was not only industry leading but provided very impressive financial results. – Emma Tolley – Head of E-Commerce, Lloyds TSB Insurance.

The insight he helped us to reach after the lab exceeded our expectations and resulted in us not only understanding the specific project we were working on, but also in creating a general model for user behavior. In short, I would not hesitate in recommending him to others. – Hugo Pickford Wardle – Lead Project Manager – LateRooms.com

David provided creative and insightful user experience analysis and recommendations for a high profile web application, which yielded significant benefits. – Andy Towler – User Experience Lead at Ixaris Systems Ltd

David is a first class user experience professional who brings innovative, ground-breaking thinking together with professionalism and pragmatism and gets things done. – Lisa Rae – User Interface Project Manager at Sony Ericsson.

This man has done more to add value to companies than anyone i know. He is without doubt one of the paramount experts in his field and during my time at Zendor the quality of his work covered both myself and the clients we worked with in glory. This man is fabulous, scoop up his words as if they were gold dust and deposit them in the Bank of Results. – Matthew Cooper – Business Development Manager at Zendor.

Steve Potts

Steve graduated from Manchester University with a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Computing.
His work to date has involved hundreds of applications in defence, handheld devices, smartphones, mobile internet and the web. Being meticulous, he is an accomplished technical editor having worked on Java, XHTML, PHP, and Wireless publications including the award winning “Son of Web Pages That Suck”, and more recently “Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress”.

As Chief Technology Officer at Hawdale Associates, Steve applies valuable experience in such wide-encompassing areas as Web Standards, Accessibility, Search Engine Optimisation, Wireless Applications, Location Based Services, Quality Procedures and Product Management.

Simon Crosbie

Simon has nearly 20 years practical experience in the design industry, from the dark ages of scalpels and spraymount to today’s digital environments.

He has a history of developing ‘the right solution’ quickly and with an almost obsessive attention to detail.

Past happy clients include CMI, UPC (United Pan-Europe Communications), Lloyds TSB, WarnerLambert Consumer Healthcare, Littlewoods, NESTA, EFI, Adobe Systems, totesport, ICL, Oxford Instruments, Channel 5 Television

Mike Little

Mike Little is a long term software developer, with many programming languages, many disciplines, and many years under his belt. You can read the nitty gritty Curriculum Vitae on-line.
In 2003 he helped Matt Mullenweg start a little project which became known as WordPress. They initially worked together with an ever-growing band of volunteer developers to build and improve the software. Development of WordPress is now managed by Automattic Inc, though it still has many volunteer contributors. Mike continues to develop sites with WordPress and currently maintains around 40 WordPress sites and blogs for himself, clients, friends, and family.

He now runs zed1.com, his web development and consultancy company, which specialises in WordPress.

Mike is a published author, co-authoring a book in 2005: “Building Online Communities With Drupal, PhpBB, and WordPress“, writing the WordPress section of the book.

He is passionate about what he does and the projects he works on. He has been interested in open source for a long time, working with and contributing to several projects, including DJGPP (a port of GCC tools for DOS), CVS, MYSQL, b2/cafelog and of course WordPress. He is particular about standards and “doing the right thing”. He has a infrequently updated personal blog, Journalized.

He lives with his family in Stockport, England.

Alison Hawdale

Alison is a Biological Sciences graduate with a Masters degree in Science and Technology Policy.

She has been employed as a university researcher in Science and Technology Policy, lecturing in Technology Assessment, and working with a wide spectrum of people across industry, education and the Civil Service. Her main involvement in this area was with the Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

She has worked as a manager in the NHS, championing Patient and Public Involvement and is a currently a member of the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) Technology Appraisal Panel.

Across Alison’s wide-ranging career, the thread running through all her work has been:

Making technology work for people, not people for technology