I'm Tyler Nielsen, a UX Product Designer and Researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. I work across the full arc from discovery and research strategy through to design systems and delivery. Hard problems don't respect category boundaries.
Currently Lead Researcher at Askable, embedding human-centred design across SaaS and non-SaaS teams. Building the research infrastructure that lets great decisions happen faster.
The projects shown here are a small selection. The breadth - aviation, government, XR, simulation, insurtech, brand experience, e-commerce - is deliberate. Different altitudes, same standard.
Also professionally certified in the fine art of pudding.
Six years. One platform. Countless iterations - and still growing.
Midnight Merchant isn't a project with a start and end date - it's a living relationship between design and a brand still finding its full form. What began in 2019 as a foundational e-commerce build has evolved through multiple platform generations, shifting consumer behaviours, and an increasingly confident brand identity that deliberately operates outside the mainstream.
The insight that has sustained six years of work: alternative commerce brands don't fail because they're unconventional - they fail because their product experience doesn't honour the conviction of their aesthetic. Every iteration on Midnight Merchant has been about closing that gap.
The critical insight across six years: the brand's darkness was an asset, not the problem. Users leaving weren't repelled by the aesthetic - they were let down by a product experience that couldn't hold the weight of the brand's promise. Inconsistency, generic components borrowed from mainstream templates, and a checkout that felt like it belonged on a different site entirely.
Every design decision since has been anchored to a single question: does this feel like Midnight Merchant, or does this feel like a template?
"Tyler redesigned our checkout and it felt like someone finally understood what our brand was trying to say."
Midnight Merchant, FounderInsurance reimagined - and fuel found, fast.
RACV partnered with Arevo to launch a next-generation insurance product targeting younger Australians. The core challenge: insurance is a famously opaque and anxiety-inducing category. Most users don't engage until something goes wrong - and by then, confusion compounds distress.
We restructured the platform's IA around three mental models every user actually holds: What am I covered for? What does it cost? What do I do if something goes wrong? Every screen answers one of these - instantly, without jargon.
RACV members have always had access to fuel price data - but the existing experience buried it. A list of stations with varying prices, no meaningful filtering, and no context for whether a price was actually good. Users were overwhelmed, not empowered.
The redesign of the Fuel Finder component was built around one clear user truth uncovered in research: people don't want the cheapest price in the state - they want the cheapest price they can actually get to, right now.
The key design decision: surface the relative value of a price, not just the absolute number. A station charging 182.9¢ means nothing in isolation - telling a user that's 8¢ below the suburb average means everything. Small label, massive trust signal.
"We went from being one of the most confusing steps in someone's year to one of the easiest."
RACV Product DirectorDesigning for a world that had never been designed for before.
Airspeeder is the world's first electric flying car racing series - eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) speeders racing an augmented reality track in remote locations, starting with Adelaide, South Australia. No comparable sport had ever existed. No comparable interface had either.
I collaborated with Alauda Aeronautics across an 18-month engagement, designing and developing 12+ interconnected systems from the ground up: portable race stations, flight control interfaces, race control, race timing, pilot augmented HUD, timing sheets, telemetry playback, track design tools, event planning systems, flight director stations, an augmented reality tabletop experience, and the pilot training flight simulator.
Every system had to work in isolation - and integrate seamlessly under live race conditions, compliant with CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) safety standards.
The most demanding design environment I have worked in. Race operations interfaces are used under extreme cognitive load - by engineers, race directors, and support crews simultaneously monitoring live telemetry during competition. There is no room for ambiguity, no graceful degradation, and no "undo".
We embedded with the race operations team, shadowed engineers during test events, and applied aviation HMI principles - progressive disclosure, colour-coded alert hierarchies, spatial consistency - so operators could access critical information without consciously searching for it. The interface had to become invisible under pressure.
"The interface essentially disappeared - operators stopped thinking about the tool and started thinking about the race."
Airspeeder, Head of OperationsStandard UX metrics don't capture the scale of what a world first means. So alongside the numbers, these are the outcomes that mattered most.
Design thinking as a real-time, adaptive practice - meeting each problem where it lives.
Immersive workshops are not templated engagements. They are facilitated design thinking environments that change shape depending on what the problem actually is - and who is in the room. The output might be a high-fidelity prototype, a business case, a set of low-fidelity sketches, or a fully 3D-modelled concept. The customer's need determines the fidelity - not the format.
Each engagement follows a fluid arc: rapid ideation, theme clustering, concept development, stakeholder pitch - but within that arc, the facilitation adapts in real time. Some teams need constraint. Some need permission. Some need a designer who can jump between Blender, a whiteboard, and a CNC laser cutter in the same afternoon.
Customers chose paint colours under fluorescent store lighting, then felt betrayed at home. The workshop was structured to surface this emotional journey - moving from the observable (customers leaving confused) to the root (colour confidence broken at point of sale). We co-designed an immersive experience that let customers experience colour in conditions that replicated their actual homes, before purchasing. The output wasn't a slide deck - it was a working prototype of the experience itself.
As an Apple ambassador, I led design for a 48-hour sprint with the Sydney Swans product team. The brief: explore how to enhance player performance on and off the field. The team - designers, developers, and marketing executives - conducted user interviews with players, coaches, and team physicians to build empathy before a single screen was touched. The outcome was a holistic player performance tracking app using in-jersey technology for in-game biometrics and off-field sleep and wellness monitoring. The UX principle was radical simplicity - data effortlessly available to players and coaches, non-intrusive to use during the game.
"People walked out not just with a colour, but with a story about why that colour was right for them."
Dulux Brand Experience ManagerThe world's first consumer-ready Airspeeder flight simulation - built in three weeks, using game design to solve a real training crisis.
Before a single Airspeeder took to the air in competition, pilots needed training. But no training framework existed - no flight manual, no simulator, no comparable aircraft to reference. The sport was being designed at the same time as the training methodology for it.
The Telstra Purple team created the world's first consumer-ready Airspeeder flight simulation from the ground up - in three weeks. A three-person team. The showcase was fronted by Christopher Smith, Telstra Purple's former CEO, demonstrating the simulation's capabilities live.
The insight that shaped the entire simulator UX: the best flight simulators in history have always borrowed from game design - not the other way around. Progressive skill unlocks, performance feedback loops, escalating challenge environments, and the feeling of earned mastery aren't entertainment gimmicks. They are the most effective tools for building procedural memory under novel conditions.
For Airspeeder, this meant designing a simulation experience that felt compelling enough to use for thousands of hours - while remaining accurate enough that those hours would transfer directly to real aircraft control. The gamification wasn't decoration. It was the training strategy.
"When pilots stepped into the real Airspeeder, the controls made sense immediately. That was the goal."
Alauda Aeronautics, Chief PilotAny problem can be solved using emerging technologies - if you're willing to ask a different question first. The projects below explore AR, LiDAR, IoT, augmented reality tabletop experiences, and connected physical-digital objects. They share a belief: the physical and digital realms are not separate. The best experiences happen where they meet.
Whether you're at the "we have an idea" stage or "we have a problem and technology might solve it" stage - I'm interested. Emerging technology projects need designers who can think in three dimensions from day one.
This form goes directly to Tyler. No agencies, no assistants.
Discovery to delivery - and everything underneath.
The Victorian Department of Transport serves millions of Victorians - a pensioner in rural Victoria, a new migrant unfamiliar with the network, a commuter with one hand on a handrail and 90 seconds to find their next connection. Universal inclusivity is the most cognitively demanding design constraint that exists. It tolerates no assumption about the user.
The project was also defined by a critical structural problem: the PTV app and the Public Transport Victoria website were designed and maintained in separate silos - with divergent information architectures, inconsistent content, and a back-end system that treated them as different products rather than different surfaces of the same service.
The research programme was built around the users most likely to be excluded by default: co-design sessions with 12 diverse user groups including elderly users, newly arrived Melburnians, users with low digital literacy, users relying on assistive technology, and users with cognitive disabilities. An accessibility-first research methodology from session design through to analysis.
Journey mapping across 6 service touchpoints - website, app, physical signage, customer service, Myki top-up, and journey planning - revealed that most pain points weren't failures of any individual channel. They were gaps between channels that no single team owned.
Detailed comparative research between the PTV app and ptv.vic.gov.au revealed fundamental misalignment - not just visual, but structural. The same journey (e.g., planning a trip from Ballarat to Southern Cross) returned different information, used different language, and presented different options depending on whether you used the app or the website.
The alignment work required negotiating shared content governance, a unified design system that spanned both surfaces, and - critically - stakeholder alignment across the two separate product teams that had never formally shared a design review.
Many of the UX inconsistencies between app and website were symptoms of backend fragmentation - separate data feeds, different API call structures, and content managed through different CMS platforms by different teams. Good design at the surface layer required understanding - and advocating for - what needed to change beneath it.
"This was the first time I felt like the government's website was actually designed for me."
User Testing Participant, Accessibility PanelLead Researcher at Askable - embedding human-centred design where it creates the most needed digital products.
Leading mixed-methods research programmes across SaaS and non-SaaS customer teams - partnering with Askable at the intersection of research operations, product strategy, and human-centred design. The mandate: make insight the operating system for product decisions, not an afterthought to them.
Research here isn't a consultancy function. It's infrastructure. The goal is to build systems that let cross-functional teams access quality research, act on findings faster, and scale their own capacity - with or without a researcher in the room.
The highest-leverage work isn't running individual studies - it's building the systems that let teams run better research without always needing a researcher to lead it. This means:
Repeatable research playbooks - facilitation patterns, recruitment templates, screener frameworks, and analysis guides that any cross-functional team can pick up and run.
A shared knowledge hub - a living repository of past insights, participant profiles, and synthesised findings that prevents teams from re-learning what was already discovered.
Research operations tooling - Miro for planning and synthesis, Figma for communicating findings visually, Qualtrics for survey insights, Askable for participant sourcing. Every tool chosen to make insight shareable, traceable, and trusted by the people who need to act on it.
These are some of the organisations whose teams this research practice has directly served - across financial services, government, automotive, employment, and transport.
A selection of organisations - full client list available on request