One person. No agency maze.

In 1992 I graduated with a Computer Science degree and walked straight into a management consultancy. Within twelve months I was wearing a "Usability Architect" badge — a title most people had never heard of. My job was to take complex business systems running on IBM 3270 mainframe terminals and make them usable for the people who had to sit in front of them eight hours a day.

That became my career. For the next seventeen years I worked across the world for blue-chip clients, applying the same core principles everywhere: understand what the user is trying to accomplish, remove everything that gets in the way, and build trust through clarity. The screens changed — from green-on-black terminals to Windows applications to the early web — but the principles never did.

In 2009 I founded Dygiphy to bring that same discipline to Australian small businesses. The problems are remarkably similar to those I solved on mainframe terminals in the 1990s: people arrive at an interface with a task, and the interface either helps them or it doesn't. Whether it's a council worker processing permits on a 3270 screen or a Melbourne tradie's customer looking for a phone number on a mobile — the design challenge is the same.

That's why I don't follow web design trends. I follow user-centred design principles that have been proven across three decades of technology change. Your website doesn't need to be fashionable. It needs to work for the people who visit it.