Matt Kelsh

Matt
Kelsh

Software Designer

I am driven by helping people. I'm quite good at translating complex systems into neat interfaces that people enjoy using.

I think bigger than the current need, and work on everything from concepts to execution, with a particular love for the craft of design—where details and systematic thinking come together to create something meaningful.

Apps by me

I worked at

Art Processors

Melbourne, Australia

Art Processors provides industry-leading expertise in experience design, technology development and immersive media production. Their work targets the cultural sector, with a long history of providing innovative technical solves for galleries and museums around the world.

I worked on

    Decoded: Australian Signals Directorate Game

      

    National Museum of Australia, Canberra

    The Decoded Game was part of the Decoded exhibit in the National Museum of Australia. The exhibition explored the exploits and achievements of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), from its origins in the Second World War to cyber challenges today.

    The Game's premise is:

    Two to five people collaborate on touchscreens, working against the clock to resolve missions based on real events—such as saving Australia's missile defence system plans and preventing a ransomware attack on a hospital.

    — Jamie Hogue, Project Director

    The game includes video cut scenes that immerse players in the wider cybersecurity narrative.

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    Each player is issued a task. Each task requires two specific tools to complete it. The tools are distributed and shared between players. Players need to verbally request the tools from their team mates, who will need to send them over so they can be used. Once a task is complete, a new one is issued. If enough tasks are completed before the time runs out, the mission is a success.

    After each mission completes, scenario video is played on the larger screen for the team.

    Neat stuff

    • Like real life, the game has interruptions – mini games – that players must quickly complete to get back to work. In one interruption the player is running low on energy and needs to take a coffee break.

    My Contribution

    I contributed the game design, game logic, and interface. This was a team effort, and I enjoyed collaborating with engineers, videographers and the Australian Signals Directorate staff themselves while putting this together.

    Result

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    The Getty Guide

      

    The Getty Museum, California

    The Getty Guide is the official app of the Getty Museum. It enables visitors to explore artworks one at a time by typing in an art ID number, or by selecting a tour, and enjoying a playlist of artworks with directions in between.

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    Challenges

    A design goal of The Getty Guide was to deliver competing experiences as one. On one hand, it needed to be a distraction-free, immersive audio narration device. On the other hand, it needed to be an everything app; a directory for the Getty Museum itself. To remedy this, we matched Getty branding throughout the main interface, and fell back to focused & minimal dark mode while using the audio player. image

    We had analytics on hand that indicated that two thirds of visitors never used the audio progress indicator to skip around an audio track, which makes a lot of sense considering the immersive content. Of the one third who did interact, ninety seven percent used it to skip back less than ten seconds. This indicated to me that this type of app doesn't need a progress bar like a music player does. I collapsed the progress bar behind a circular progress button, and offered the same UX when a visitor would tap the volume button. This tested really well, and helped save some precious vertical space on the small iPod Touch display.

    Neat stuff

    • The two-tone visual style of the header is inspired by Canto VIII by Barnett Newman, which was on display in the Getty Museum at the time.
    • The Getty Guide featured a pdf-based multi-level map. Visitors could select levels to find what they were looking for.
    • We built an events system into the middle tab, so visitors can see a live "What's on" guide while they were exploring the space.
    • The app supports 10 language options with key content in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese

    My Contribution

    I was the sole designer on this project. I collaborated closely with the Getty team as I planned the interface, styles, and feature set. I would facilitate regular presentations to keep our client updated. My responsibilities included creating wireframes, low and high-fidelity prototypes, establishing typography and colour palettes, and developing a comprehensive design system with assets. Throughout implementation, I worked alongside engineers and assisted with quality assurance testing.

    Result

    Years later, The Getty Guide is no longer an in-house iPod Touch interface; its available for all mobile devices (including android). The foundations I helped establish in the Getty Guide app are still going strong, which is now past version 3.

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My role

I enjoyed being able to think outside the app at Art Processors. Instead of focusing on mobile app delivery, I considered aspects of iOS devices that could be used in novel ways to delight museum visitors. I found that being able to flex iOS and android's accessibility features to be very rewarding.

In my role at Art Processors, I collaborated with client staff, designers, engineers and other team members to deliver projects such as

  • Pladia
  • MONA
  • Australian Sports Museum
  • National Museum of Australia
  • Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame

Itty Bitty Apps

Melbourne, Australia

Founded in 2009, Itty Bitty Apps was one of the most respected mobile consulting and product development companies in Australia. They worked with large orgs like AGL, ANZ, AIA, BOM, Coles, SEEK, Sensis, realestate.com.au, Lonely Planet and Latitude Financial to bring category-leading mobile apps to market. They were renowned for their passion, obsession with great user experience, software engineering and design.

I was the first designer hired by Itty Bitty Apps. In addition to consulting, they maintained an in-house product called Reveal (A runtime view debugging tool for iOS). I got to be the lead designer for Reveal 2 for Mac.

Itty Bitty Apps was acquired by Mantel Group in 2022.

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In my time at Itty Bitty Apps, I collaborated with team members to deliver the projects above + a few more things.

  • Reveal (and Soundstagram!)
  • AGL Energy
  • AIA Vitality (Aus)
  • ANZ Grow
  • Supp
  • BOM Weather

LIFX

Melbourne, Australia

Before LIFX started the smart home revolution in 2012 with the first multicoloured LED Wi-Fi light bulb, they broke the record for the most backed Kickstarter project.

I worked on

    Web and Store Concepts

      

    HTML/CSS, Melbourne

    At the time, the top of the LIFX webpage was dedicated to an inline video about their successful Kickstarter campaign, with no obvious path to purcasing. Their online store used a Shopify front end, which worked very well.

    Challenges

    There wasn't a style guide or coherent brand identity established for the startup. They were moving fast, and these details weren't a priority early on. Many customers struggled with setting up the bulbs, and support was done primarily through email. Potential customers had to scroll near the end of the page before they were shown an option to purchase a light bulb. LIFX couldn't manufacture bulbs fast enough to meet demand at the time, and the only way customers could buy them was through the LIFX website. The Shopify store was put together quickly to sell bulbs, and was a grid of bulbs of various colours, packs, types, bundles and so on. There were reports of people buying the wrong type of light bulb (Edison/screw vs bayonet), and sometimes the wrong colour.

    Neat stuff

    • The LIFX bulbs were handed out to staff like they were lollies
    • It was cool to use colours like hot pink at the time
    • There were hundreds of beautiful multi-coloured lights on display in the Cremorne workplace

    My Contribution

    I established a colour palette to use across the web products that comprised of warm neutral tones with a single highlight colour (hot pink).

    I added a button to watch the kickstarter video in a lightbox, rather than inline at the top of the page. Customers viewing the page would see a primary action ("Buy Now") and a secondary action ("Watch our video").

    Instead of listing every bulb option as a pack, I decided on a purchasing flow that let customers see the product they were ordering. The steps in the flow let them select the bulb model, colour, cap type, and then the quantity.

    Mobile App Concept

      

    iOS & Android, Melbourne

    The LIFX App is the official app for LIFX, and it enables customers to control their lightbulbs and set scenes. It was core to the value proposition of a Wi-Fi enabled light bulb, and worked well enough on both iOS and android.

    Challenges

    The bulb control part of the LIFX app looked and fine. But, the overall UX of the app was a bit convoluted. It used two hamburger menus for bulb and scene selection, and bulb setup was extremely slow and fraught with potential errors.

    Neat stuff

    • I got to work with some incredible developers, many of whom are my friends today.
    • There was a strobe effect capability of the bulbs that we restricted in software to only work while you were holding the button in the app.

    My Contribution

    I put together a UX plan for improving the navigation of the app, which added a home for pre-set visual effects (strobe, flame, aurora, etc). The plan focused on onboarding for new users and easy to find support if things didn't go so well.

    In this nowhere-near-completed concept design, I explored placing the colour wheel on an adaptive background that would darken/lighten with the brightness of the bulb. The selected colour and brightness is always depicted in the navigation bar at the top.

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My role

Being a startup, I covered a gamut of roles, including designing their iOS and Android apps, firmware update software (win), web-design, amazon store configuration, branding, packaging, as well as doing photography and video production. I worked closely with the CEO, engineers and other team members to deliver various solutions.

Shifty Jelly

Adelaide, Australia

Shifty Jelly was an independent software company that saw huge success with Pocket Weather in Australia, and Pocket Casts internationally.

I worked on

    Pocket Casts

      

    iOS & Android, Adelaide

    Pocket Casts was an award winning podcast player for iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web. It was made by Shifty Jelly. The app was one of the first to feature a server backend that handled podcast checking and parsing, allowing users to quickly see updates for hundreds of podcasts without the typical delays of regular apps.

    Challenges

    The goals for Pocket Casts were always to be simple, beautiful and functional. It needed to serve two distinct user types: simple listeners who subscribe only to active podcasts, and collectors who subscribe to everything and need sophisticated organisation tools.

    We were making this at a time when the iOS and Android were still establishing their foundations. Google introduced Material Design whilst version 3 was in development, and Apple released iOS 7 during version 4 development. Each release of Pocket Casts was built for a moving target.

    Most podcast apps required manual URL input to subscribe to podcasts, and would then check each podcast server individually for updates. This would cause a significant delay before downloads could begin. Pocket Casts had a best-in-class server infrastructure, and we wanted to make an in-app podcast directory to show it off.

    Neat stuff

    • The Pocket Casts app icon was featured in The App Icon Book.
    • In version 3, we added an easter egg on the about screen. If you tap the background enough, a creeper appears, explodes, and ends your game.
    • The shiny, textured and skeumorphic design for Pocket Casts 4 pretty much done when Apple announced the new design language for iOS 7. We re-designed the entire interface from scratch and built it in time for release day.

    My Contribution

    I designed the app icon!

    I was the sole designer for versions 3 and 4. In terms of visual design, these were the ones where we introduced material design fundamentals on android, and modern iOS flat-design style after iOS 7. The play screen would sample colours from the podcast artwork and build a colour palette on the fly and apply it to the play controls. It was one of the first apps to do this.

    Functionally, these versions added the customisable smart filters that Pocket Casts was famous for. Customising these can get pretty complicated, and the UX (and colourful Ui) of these filters is something i'm still quite proud of.

    Result

    Pocket Casts is still one of the world's most used podcasting apps. In 2015, it won a Google Material Design Award.

    The app (and staff) was acquired by NPR, and then Automattic, where it is still maintained today.

    Pocket Weather

      

    iOS & Android, Adelaide

    Pocket Weather, a highly successful Australian weather app, was designed with a focus on accurate data and a visually appealing interface. It featured a simple, two-tiered layout with weather conditions, forecasts, and radar information, and was available on multiple platforms.

    Neat stuff

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My role

I was the sole designer at the time, so I covered every aspect of designing their products, concepts, strategy, prototyping, detailed mockups, asset creation and working with the development team to see those concepts become reality.

The full product design lifecycle from concept to execution was routine.

I used my public speaking skills to present Shifty Jelly to the audience at the second Swipe conference in 2012.

Please get in touch if you’d like to work with me.

📸 📷 🦋 🐘