Agentic AI — Service Design & Product Strategy (2025–2026)

Reimagining how credit lending teams work with AI

In 2025 I led the discovery and product design of an Agentic AI platform for the Business Credit Lending team, exploring how AI could fundamentally reshape credit origination, underwriting workflows, and document intelligence.

Rather than treating AI as a "chat layer", the objective was to design an operational AI system embedded directly into lending workflows, capable of interacting with core banking systems, retrieving documentation, and assisting with credit memo creation end-to-end.

Discovery

Understanding real lending operations

I ran a series of workshops with credit lending SMEs to map how deals were actually processed in practice. This revealed a highly fragmented workflow:

• Information scattered across multiple internal systems
• Manual retrieval of documents across portals
• Repetitive credit memo drafting and formatting
• High cognitive load when assessing deal risk
• Heavy reliance on institutional knowledge rather than system intelligence

From this, I mapped the end-to-end lending journey, identifying key "decision moments" where AI could intervene meaningfully rather than superficially.

Design approach

From workflows to agentic systems

The experience was designed as a multi-agent workspace, not a traditional UI. Key capabilities designed and prototyped:

• Deal Origination Agent – analyses incoming applications and summarises risk signals
• Document Intelligence Layer – aggregates and retrieves deal-related documentation via API integrations
• Credit Memo Generator – produces structured credit memos with editable AI assistance
• Conversational Deal Interface – allows users to query deals via natural language
• Audit & Traceability Layer – ensures compliance visibility across all AI outputs

We rapidly iterated clickable prototypes directly in workshops, refining the system in real time with underwriters and relationship managers. This allowed us to validate the concept within weeks and secure funding approval for build.

Experience design

From prototype to production system

Once validated, the platform was evolved into a SaaS-ready internal AI tool. Key design decisions included:

• Extending the existing Cynergy design system into a dedicated AI product skin
• Creating a separate visual language for AI interactions (clarity, trust, and traceability)
• Designing conversational UI patterns for structured financial data
• Supporting multimodal interaction (text + voice + experimental AI avatar interface)

The product was integrated with SSO and deployed directly into the credit lending team’s daily workflow.

Impact

From assistant to operational engine

The Agentic AI system became a core part of the credit lending workflow, enabling users to:

• Generate and edit credit memos significantly faster
• Access deal documentation instantly via natural language
• Reduce dependency on manual system navigation
• Improve consistency of underwriting outputs
• Centralise fragmented systems into one workspace

The platform has since evolved into a foundational AI capability within the bank and has been recognised in industry award shortlists, including Computing AI Awards 2026 (Best AI Project nomination).

Core Banking Platform — Digital Transformation Foundation (2023–2025)

First principles

The organisation had strong banking fundamentals but a fragmented digital experience: no modern mobile app at launch, legacy online banking with poor usability, rising support tickets, and low customer satisfaction. Systems had been designed around regulatory structure, not user needs.

My role expanded to leading end-to-end UX for a new mobile banking app, a redesigned online banking platform, and a unified design system across product teams.

Discovery

Identifying systemic UX failures

Key issues identified across the existing platform:

• Authentication friction causing high call centre volume
• Overloaded dashboards with no prioritisation
• Business banking layered onto personal banking — not designed independently
• High cognitive load across core journeys

A major insight was that onboarding and login were trust problems, not usability problems.

Design approach

Rebuilding from first principles

We adopted a greenfield redesign approach, rebuilding the experience from scratch using Flutter. This included re-architecting core journeys across personal and business banking, reworking integration with core banking systems (including Equation), aligning UX flows with operational and compliance constraints, and running cross-functional workshops across engineering, operations, and product.

Technical

Design system — scaling consistency across teams

To address fragmentation across engineering teams, I led the creation of a structured design system: 140+ components documented for design and engineering, with accessibility embedded at component level. The system was iteratively evolved from Figma into a production-ready system, and integrated with Flutter Widgetbook to align design and code parity — significantly reducing duplication, inconsistency, and QA issues across squads.

Delivery

Key product capabilities shipped

Across app and online banking platforms, we delivered:

• App-based login replacing external authentication device
• Fast-track onboarding for savings products
• RM video appointment booking portal
• Real-time notifications (push + SMS)
• Full payments suite (Faster Payments, CHAPS, SWIFT, SEPA)
• Bulk payments for business users
• Multi-authorisation workflows
• Enriched payment data via Tapix integration

Outcome

Improving trust and reducing friction

One of the most impactful changes was replacing the broken authentication system with app-based deep-link authentication, which:

• Reduced login-related support tickets
• Improved customer trust signals (including Trustpilot uplift)
• Increased mobile app adoption significantly

Product lifecycle

From launch to maturity

Post-launch, the focus shifted to stabilising releases across scaling teams, migrating the design system fully into Figma, improving component governance via Widgetbook, and addressing QA and consistency issues across the Flutter implementation. This phase established a long-term scalable foundation for digital banking delivery.

The challenge

The importance of risk modelling

Some $1.5 trillion in mortgages are currently up for renewal, a potential time bomb as higher interest rates push down property values. The war in Ukraine, hyper-inflation, supply-chain issues, strict climate legislation moving towards NetZero 2050 and a general lag in uptake from economies still reeling from Covid, are all contributing to severe pressure on markets, banks and borrowers. And that’s where risk modelling comes in handy. Over the course of around a year or so I helped OakNorth design a suite of apps that would model this adverse risk on credit lending portfolios.

OakNorth have created what they call ‘the forward look’ – an algorithm that is one of the most sophisticated in the banking industry at present. It models macroeconomic impacts on industrial levels, which then impact on borrowers, in whichever industry they may be in. Considering that a lot of borrowers are feeling the strain currently, the new apps give banks foresight into how those borrowers will cope with those strains later down the line. It is basically a ‘crystal ball’. This is a coveted resource in the financial industry and a lot of banks are falling over themselves to try and build something that half works – let alone does it to the accuracy of OakNorth. We are talking an accuracy rate of around 80%. This is a game changer.

Strategy

Creating an ecosystem

OakNorth had been sitting on a vision for at least a year or so prior to when they asked me to come on board in early May 2022. I was interested in Risk and they had some ideas about risk apps. A perfect combo.

Although they have been quietly building a number of other apps, the plan was to sell the new ONCI risk apps to other banks. The design director, Andy Hajitheodoulou, who I would be working closely with, joined around 3 months before me and had started pulling together that vision – after some early discovery workshops – the vision being to unify 3 greenfield apps that were being designed independently by 3 separate teams based in separate locations. There would be many more workshops though, mostly technical workshops for each feature of the apps – but we had an idea to work with.

Climate

Climate opportunities for sustainable banking

An amazing app we designed and built at OakNorth is the ON Climate app. This app will scan your loan book and pick out climate opportunities for your bank – with a view that borrowers are subject to climate legislations (ie. NetZero 2050), the app will tell you how fit a borrower is to survive those expectations through to 2050, and what their capital expenditure would be to survive the key points in time when legislature comes into play. This creates a lot of opportunity for lending to those borrowers – rated for ‘transition risk’, the more capital they need, the higher their risk rating. Prince Charles famously said “Unless we can actually unlock private sector resource, innovation and finance, with the public sector setting a framework of incentives and regulation, we just don’t stand a chance of solving the existential crises we have engineered over the years.” Now it’s here – ON Climate.

As an OakNorth Climate user I want:

• Lending opportunities related to Climate transition risk.
• To mitigate my bank's climate transition risk.
• To keep up to date with FED requirements and stay ahead of the competition.
• To understand how much money I could lose from climate transition.
• An accurate solution using industry standard climate models (NGFS).

Delivery

Shared information architecture

Connecting the architecture so borrowers are categorised by NAICS industry is crucial. Our modelling engine channels its algorithms through a NAICS structure, and most banks are already familiar with NAICS. The original idea is for borrower, industry, and sector pages to be accessible in a top-down and bottom-up hierarchy across all three apps. It sounds like a great idea, but in reality it is impossible to keep all three apps fully synchronised because each app cannot guarantee complete coverage of a bank’s loan book, especially in the early stages. Full coverage is expected to come later. Although the apps now share the same design language and components, they still feel and behave like one connected system. The design architecture adapts to separate the apps within a wrapper interface, while still allowing users to move between the three applications through a side menu.

Delivery

Leveraging research as part of the design process

Working as lead product designer, I spoke to specialists from dozens of banks, from relationship managers to portfolio managers, from underwriters to chief risk officers, to C-Suite users, we carefully took note of each users responsibilities and took that into account in the design process so that we knew which features were applicable to each role.

One of the major challenges we faced, which we overcame through research, was understanding how banks perceive borrower risk and the steps they take to mitigate. In order to design these applications it was necessary to understand all the steps in a borrower’s lifecycle. Providing the right metrics and data came about through rigorous testing and discussions with SME’s to arrive at a design that is ‘industry standard’ in its presentation. Another challenge, which kind of follows on from the first challenge, was which industry system to leverage – we opted for the NAICS system due to its universal adoption amongst our target audience. We built the apps so that users could navigate top-to-bottom through industries seamlessly.

Delivery

ON Scenarios

Lets say Borrower A has taken out a $10m loan from the bank. As this loan is heavily invested into real estate our apps can determine if the borrower has enough financial resource to continue paying down that loan NOW, or in the next 12, 24 or even 36 months, considering that interest rates have doubled in the last 2 years, and may continue to rise, we’ll model a rise, and considering many other macroeconomic factors like decrease in GDP, increase in fuel costs, supply chain issues, unemployment and at least 20 other major factors, we’ll model those changes too.

As an OakNorth Scenarios user I want:

• To expose industry and borrower risks in my portfolio.
• To be able to understand future risks based on accurate assumption models.
• Be equipped with data for market risks: Covid, War in Ukraine, Inflation etc.
• TStress test my portfolio borrowers and industries/sectors
• To adjust my assumption model macroeconomic factors (GDP, interest rates etc).

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Delivery

Data viz whizzy-whizz

In data-heavy platforms like the ON suite of risk products, data visualisation is critical because it transforms complexity into clarity. Without strong visualisation, users are forced to interpret large volumes of raw information manually, which increases cognitive load, slows decision-making, and raises the likelihood of error. At scale, visualisation is less about “making data look good” and more about enabling faster comprehension, pattern recognition, and confident action.

A well-designed data visualisation layer helps users:

• Identify trends and anomalies quickly.
• Understand relationships between datasets.
• Prioritise attention in complex environments.
• Reduce time-to-insight.
• Make higher-confidence decisions under pressure.

Delivery

ON Monitoring - the final piece

The ultimate in providing banks with an early warning system on borrower, industry or sector level that can allow risk officers to mitigate potential risks in real time, as opposed to 1 year after it happened which is so often the case.

As an OakNorth Monitoring user I want:

• Early warnings when my borrower has breached bank policy.
• One source of truth (I currently access 6 different systems).
• Efficiency gains from annual reviews - you tell me the problems.
• I want wider peer groups that extend beyond my limited portfolio.
• I want real-time financial data and make decisions on that data.

Strategy

With success comes a strategy blueprint

With the help of a dedicate user researcher we committed to around 9 phases of user testing, each phase ranged from 3-8 users. Each phase was aimed at a specific milestone, whether it was initial discovery (phase 1) or something further down the line after 8 or 9 phases (Peers Analysis). Learnings were captured in Miro, dissected forensically, and reiterations were made and then further tested.

The challenge

Transforming Private Capital Intelligence Through Product Design

In 2018, I joined Preqin to help shape the next generation of products for the private capital industry. My focus was leading UX and product design across what became Preqin Pro — a modern data intelligence platform designed to help investors, analysts, and fund managers navigate one of the world’s most complex financial datasets with greater speed, clarity, and confidence. Preqin Pro sat behind a subscription model and connected directly into one of the industry’s largest private capital datasets. The challenge wasn’t simply visualising data — it was transforming a fragmented legacy ecosystem into a scalable, user-centred platform capable of supporting sophisticated investment workflows. Across two consultancy engagements, I worked across multiple initiatives within the wider Preqin product ecosystem, including:

• Preqin Pro
• The redesign of preqin.com
• A new client-facing Data Contribution platform
• Machine learning and research tooling for internal analyst teams
• Cross-product design systems and UI governance

The work combined product strategy, UX leadership, service design, systems thinking, and hands-on interaction design within a fast-moving fintech environment.

Strategy

Replatforming a Legacy Enterprise Ecosystem

Preqin’s original platform had evolved over many years alongside the company’s rapid growth. While the underlying data offering was highly valuable, the user experience had become increasingly fragmented and difficult to scale.

Users frequently struggled with:

• Inconsistent navigation and information architecture
• Duplicated entity records across asset classes
• Slow and inefficient workflows
• Difficulty locating performance and benchmarking data
• Disconnected search experiences
• Complex, multi-step journeys for common tasks

One of the most critical structural problems was the way entities were modelled across the platform. Firms were separated into siloed asset-class views — meaning a single organisation could appear multiple times depending on context. Users searching for a company such as BlackRock might encounter numerous disconnected profiles, each containing only partial information.

This created significant friction for investment professionals who needed a unified view of firms, funds, performance, and relationships.

The redesign effort became much more than a UI refresh — it was fundamentally a product and data architecture transformation.

Strategy

Defining a User-Centred Product Vision

The team took a greenfield approach to rethinking the platform experience from the ground up.

Working closely with product managers, stakeholders, developers, researchers, and other designers, we established a product vision centred around:

• Unified entity modelling
• Faster access to critical investment data
• Reduced cognitive load
• Flexible research workflows
• Scalable information architecture
• Modern visualisation and benchmarking tools

A key innovation was the move toward a single-profile entity model, enabling users to access all relevant information about a firm in one place regardless of asset class or sector. This significantly improved discoverability, reduced duplication, and aligned the platform more closely with how investment professionals actually think and work.

Discovery

Discovery, Workshops & Rapid Prototyping

The early discovery phase was highly collaborative and workshop-driven. Over several months, the design team worked closely with stakeholders across research, engineering, and commercial functions to map workflows, define product epics, and validate assumptions.

The initial platform vision focused on five core product areas:

• Dashboard and market overview experiences
• Global search and discovery
• Advanced list building and screening
• Entity profile experiences
• Data visualisation and benchmarking

As part of a multi-disciplinary UX/UI team, I primarily led design across dashboards, profile architecture, and data visualisation experiences, while also contributing to wider platform improvements throughout delivery.

The work involved:

• User journey mapping
• Information architecture design
• Workflow modelling
• Wireframing and prototyping
• Stakeholder alignment sessions
• Design-to-development collaboration
• Iterative usability testing

Given the complexity of the data and workflows, prototyping became essential to validating concepts early and reducing delivery risk before engineering implementation.

Delivery

Leading Through User Insight & Accessibility

One of the major themes throughout the project was balancing visual sophistication with usability and accessibility.

Early high-fidelity concepts explored a dark-themed interface designed to position the product as premium and data-rich. However, usability testing quickly revealed a mismatch between aesthetic ambition and real-world usage patterns.

Users spending long periods analysing dense financial datasets reported:

• Eye strain during extended sessions
• Reduced readability of smaller data points
• Difficulty scanning complex tables and charts
• Navigation fatigue within deep workflows

The research reinforced the importance of designing for sustained professional usage rather than visual novelty.

Based on these findings, we pivoted toward a lighter, more accessible interface system with improved hierarchy, contrast, and readability. We also simplified navigation patterns, clarified distinctions between search modes, and improved filtering behaviours across the platform.

This iterative process helped establish a stronger culture of evidence-based product decision making across the team.

Delivery

Launching MVP & Establishing Continuous Product Improvement

The first internal MVP launched in 2018, followed by an extended optimisation and stabilisation phase before public release in 2019.

Rather than treating launch as the finish line, the product evolved into a continuous improvement programme driven by:

• User feedback loops
• Analytics and behavioural insight
• Ongoing usability testing
• Feature refinement
• Navigation optimisation
• Performance improvements

This shift toward iterative product development represented a major cultural evolution from the legacy platform approach.

AIML

Designing Research & Machine Learning Tools

Following the successful rollout of Preqin Pro, I worked with the Research division on additional products designed to support both internal analysts and external contributors.

This included

Machine Learning Research Platform

A new tool enabling research teams to analyse and enrich large datasets using machine learning-assisted workflows.

Data Contribution Platform

A redesigned experience allowing clients and internal users to submit data directly into Preqin’s ecosystem more efficiently and accurately. The legacy contribution process was slow, highly manual, and deeply tied to ageing internal systems. Users often spent hours submitting returns, AUM updates, fund information, and historical performance data.

The redesign focused on:

• Reducing submission time
• Simplifying complex workflows
• Improving data validation feedback
• Increasing transparency and trust
• Creating clearer communication between contributors and research teams
• Streamlining operational efficiency

The result was a much more modern, task-oriented experience designed around progressive disclosure and user intent rather than legacy system constraints.

Delivery

Building design systems at scale

One of the most impactful aspects of my second engagement at Preqin was helping establish a shared design system and reusable component library across the wider product ecosystem.

As the platform portfolio expanded, consistency and scalability became increasingly important.

The design system enabled teams to:

• Create greater UI consistency across products
• Accelerate design and engineering workflows
• Improve accessibility standards
• Reduce duplicated effort
• Support faster prototyping and delivery
• Establish a shared product language across teams

This foundation helped mature design operations within the organisation and supported a more scalable product development culture moving forward. Seen here is an example of the design system applied to the corporate website

Post launch

Outcome

The work at Preqin helped transition a legacy financial data platform into a more modern, scalable, and user-centred product ecosystem. More importantly, it demonstrated how strategic UX and product design can play a critical role in simplifying complex financial workflows, improving decision-making, and enabling organisations to evolve legacy enterprise systems into modern digital products.

The challenge

Overview

Jellyfish partnered with a major UK telecommunications provider to explore a new AI-powered product designed to support small businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic. The goal was to simplify digital advertising for SMEs by reducing the complexity of managing multi-channel campaigns across platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

As Lead Product Designer, I was responsible for shaping the product vision from early discovery through to validated prototype. This included defining user journeys, leading UX strategy, facilitating workshops, directing UI execution, and validating the proposition through iterative testing.

The outcome was a scalable campaign management platform that enabled non-technical users to launch, manage and optimise cross-channel advertising campaigns in minutes.

The challenge

The idea

Small businesses relied heavily on social platforms to generate awareness and sales, yet the tooling available across advertising ecosystems was fragmented, overly technical and difficult to navigate without specialist knowledge.

The client identified an opportunity to create a unified platform that could:

• Simplify campaign creation across multiple advertising channels
• Reduce barriers for non-technical business owners
• Use AI to automate optimisation and performance analysis
• Deliver a more accessible, self-serve marketing experience

At the outset, the product existed purely as a hypothesis. Our challenge was to validate whether the concept solved a genuine user need and whether businesses would trust an AI-assisted workflow to manage paid advertising.

Overview

My role

As Lead UX/UI Product Designer, I led the end-to-end design process across discovery, service design, UX strategy and interface design.

Responsibilities included:

• Leading product discovery workshops with stakeholders and product teams
• Defining user journeys and service flows
• Translating business requirements into validated product concepts
• Creating low and high-fidelity prototypes in Figma
• Planning and moderating usability testing sessions
• Synthesising research insights into prioritised product improvements
• Establishing scalable UI patterns using BT component libraries
• Collaborating closely with developers, UX researchers and product stakeholders throughout delivery

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Discovery

Discovery & Product Strategy

We began by mapping the full campaign creation lifecycle and identifying key friction points across existing advertising tools.

Research revealed several consistent challenges:

• Users found advertising platforms intimidating and overly complex
• Campaign setup processes were fragmented across multiple systems
• Reporting metrics varied significantly between channels
• Small businesses lacked confidence interpreting campaign performance data

To validate assumptions early, we created lightweight journey maps, rapid wireframes and clickable prototypes that allowed us to test core workflows before committing to detailed UI execution.

This iterative approach helped align stakeholders quickly while reducing delivery risk.

Delivery

Designing an AI-Assisted Experience

A core part of the product proposition was the integration of AI-driven campaign support.

The platform was designed to help users:

• Generate campaigns across multiple channels from a single workflow
• Receive automated recommendations and performance insights
• Analyse campaign effectiveness in real time
• Optimise spend and targeting with minimal manual intervention

One of the most complex UX challenges involved normalising campaign reporting data across different advertising ecosystems.

Metrics such as CPC, ROI, conversions and engagement varied significantly depending on campaign objectives and platform-specific structures. We worked closely with stakeholders and researchers to develop a consistent reporting framework that simplified decision-making without oversimplifying the data.

This resulted in a more coherent analytics experience that made campaign performance accessible to non-expert users.

Refinement

User Testing & Iteration

Validation was central to the product process. Over the course of the project, we conducted more than 80 moderated usability testing sessions with a combination of external participants and internal operational teams.

Each round of testing focused on evaluating:

• Campaign setup flows
• Navigation clarity
• Understanding of AI recommendations
• Reporting and analytics comprehension
• Cross-channel workflow usability

Insights were prioritised and fed directly into agile design sprints, allowing the product to evolve rapidly through continuous iteration.

This process helped de-risk the product significantly before development began and ensured the final experience was grounded in real user behaviour rather than stakeholder assumptions.

Delivery

Design Systems & Scalability

Following validation of the core journeys, we transitioned the product into a scalable UI framework using BT’s existing design system and component libraries.

This enabled:

• Faster iteration across teams
• Improved visual consistency
• Greater accessibility alignment
• More efficient developer handoff
• Scalable patterns for future product growth

The final output balanced speed, usability and enterprise-level scalability while remaining approachable for less digitally mature users.

Results

Outcome

The project successfully validated the product hypothesis and established a strong foundation for development.

Key outcomes included:

• A validated AI-assisted campaign management proposition
• End-to-end responsive product journeys
• A scalable component-driven UI framework
• Extensive usability validation across multiple user groups
• A simplified advertising workflow for non-technical SMEs
• Alignment between business goals, user needs and technical feasibility

The project ultimately progressed into development following stakeholder approval and successful concept validation.

Wrap up

Reflection

This project highlighted the importance of balancing innovation with usability — particularly when designing AI-assisted experiences for non-expert audiences.

Beyond interface design, the role required strategic thinking across product definition, systems design, stakeholder alignment, research synthesis and scalable UX delivery.

It reinforced the value of rapid validation, collaborative product thinking and designing complex systems in ways that feel intuitive, trustworthy and accessible.

Below you can see how the initial designs I handed off were about as close as you get to being dev ready. This was due to a combination of design skill and effective use of component libraries and design styling.

The challenge

Overview

In 2017, I joined the team at Chelsea Apps as Lead UX/UI Designer to redesign the digital experience for Vanquis Bank across both mobile app and web platforms.

The existing product suffered from significant usability and accessibility issues, resulting in poor customer sentiment and a mobile app rating of just 2.4 stars. Over a six-month engagement, we transformed the experience into a modern, accessible and user-centred banking platform, increasing the app rating to 4.8 stars and helping the product win Best Fintech App at the UK App Awards 2018.

The project combined product strategy, UX research, accessibility design, rapid prototyping and continuous user testing within a fast-paced agile delivery environment.

More

The challenge

Vanquis needed to modernise a digital banking experience that had evolved without a clear UX strategy or cohesive design system.

Key issues included:

• Poor accessibility and readability
• Inconsistent UI patterns and visual language
• Low customer trust and usability frustration
• Fragmented experiences between app and web
• Lack of scalable design standards
• Minimal evidence of user-centred design practices

The challenge extended beyond visual redesign. The objective was to rebuild confidence in the product by creating a simpler, more accessible and more intuitive banking experience for a highly diverse customer base.

Overview

My role

As Lead UX/UI Designer, I led the redesign effort across discovery, UX strategy, interaction design and UI system development.

Responsibilities included:

• Auditing the existing digital experience
• Defining UX strategy and usability priorities
• Leading product workshops with agency and client stakeholders
• Creating wireframes, user flows and high-fidelity prototypes
• Conducting and moderating usability testing sessions
• Establishing accessibility-first UI principles
• Developing a modular design system
• Collaborating closely with developers, stakeholders and researchers across agile delivery cycles

I worked across both agency and client environments, balancing agile product delivery with more traditional enterprise stakeholder processes.

Initialisation

Product Audit & UX Analysis

During the initial discovery phase, I conducted a full UX review of the existing app and website experience.

The audit revealed multiple systemic usability issues:

• Typography lacked hierarchy and readability
• Interactive elements failed accessibility standards
• Navigation patterns were inconsistent
• Visual clutter reduced clarity and confidence
• Critical journeys required unnecessary cognitive effort

It became clear that the experience had been built incrementally without a cohesive design foundation or accessibility considerations.

Rather than applying superficial visual improvements, we approached the redesign as a ground-up product rethink focused on usability, clarity and trust.

Delivery

Building an Accessibility-First Design System

One of the most important insights emerged during early research and testing sessions: the user base spanned a wide demographic range, including many customers with accessibility needs.

This fundamentally shaped the product direction.

We introduced a new design language inspired by iOS Human Interface principles, prioritising:

• Larger, more legible typography
• Stronger contrast and visual hierarchy
• Simpler layouts and interaction patterns
• More accessible button sizing and touch targets
• Reduced visual noise and decorative clutter
• Consistent spacing and component behaviour

To support scalability, I helped establish a modular UI framework built around a 6px spacing system and reusable component patterns.

This created consistency across both app and web experiences while improving collaboration between design and development teams.

Refinement

Lean UX & Continuous Validation

The project followed a highly iterative Lean UX approach centred around rapid prototyping and continuous user validation.

Working in agile sprint cycles, we designed, prototyped and tested features continuously throughout the engagement.

Rather than relying on static wireframes alone, we created interactive high-fidelity prototypes in Marvel that allowed users to experience realistic product flows before development.

Usability testing sessions were conducted fortnightly using real Vanquis customers recruited directly by the client.

Each session generated actionable insights that were immediately fed back into the product backlog and prioritised within upcoming sprints.

This iterative process significantly reduced delivery risk while ensuring design decisions remained grounded in real customer behaviour.

Testing

Designing for Real Users

One of the defining aspects of the project was the depth of accessibility research and behavioural insight gathered during testing.

A particularly impactful session involved a visually impaired participant demonstrating how he navigated digital products using assistive technology and reading tools.

Sessions like these fundamentally influenced design decisions and reinforced the importance of inclusive product thinking.

Over time, repeated testing helped align the app and website into a single, unified experience. Eventually, users began commenting that they could no longer distinguish between the two platforms — a strong signal that the ecosystem had achieved consistency and coherence.

Results

Cross-Functional Collaboration

The project required close collaboration across both agency and enterprise environments. I worked regularly with stakeholders at Vanquis Bank’s offices in Chatham while also collaborating with multidisciplinary teams at Chelsea Apps.

This meant balancing two very different operational models:

• Agile product delivery within the agency
• More traditional waterfall planning structures within the client organisation

A key part of the role involved bridging these working styles, aligning stakeholders and maintaining momentum across research, design and delivery.

Wrap up

Outcome

The redesign delivered measurable improvements across usability, accessibility and customer satisfaction.

Key outcomes included:

• App Store rating increased from 2.4 to 4.8 stars
• Winner of Best Fintech App at the UK App Awards 2018
• Unified web and mobile banking experience
• Accessibility-first design framework
• Modular design system for scalable delivery
• Continuous user validation embedded into product development
• Improved usability and customer confidence across key journeys

Wrap up

Reflection

This project reinforced the value of continuous user feedback as a core product design practice rather than a one-off validation step.

The success of the redesign was not driven by visual polish alone, but by consistent iteration, accessibility thinking and deep collaboration between users, stakeholders and delivery teams.

It also highlighted how strong UX leadership can transform not only interfaces, but the way organisations think about product development, customer needs and long-term digital strategy.

Intro

Overview

A mature design system is a foundational capability for scaling product development across multidisciplinary teams. It enables organisations to reduce inconsistency, accelerate delivery, and improve collaboration between design and engineering.

At a systems level, it shifts teams away from ad-hoc, screen-by-screen design towards a component-led approach, where high-fidelity, production-aligned interfaces are composed from shared, governed building blocks. This reduces ambiguity, shortens feedback loops, and improves design-to-development fidelity.

In Figma, this is operationalised through a centralised library of tokens, styles, and components—structured to support reuse, extensibility, and long-term maintainability.

The challenge

Establishing the system

During a contract with HCL Technologies, I led the definition and rollout of a new design system library for the Corporate Banking design team. The objective was to create a single, scalable source of truth that could support multiple product streams and ensure consistency across a complex banking domain.

The work involved deconstructing existing validated interfaces into a structured system of reusable components and styles, aligned to a strict set of design principles and an approved visual language.

Rather than treating this as a one-off deliverable, the system was designed as an evolving product in itself—continuously refined through collaboration with designers, validated through real-world usage, and iterated as new patterns emerged.

Using Figma’s shared libraries and publishing model, updates could be distributed instantly across teams, ensuring adoption without introducing version fragmentation.

Overview

System philosophy and structure

While methodologies such as Atomic Design provide useful conceptual framing, in practice they can introduce unnecessary abstraction and cognitive overhead for teams operating at scale. A more effective approach is to optimise for usability, clarity, and adoption, rather than taxonomy for its own sake.

The system was therefore structured around three practical layers:

• Design tokens (colour, type, spacing, elevation)
• Core components (inputs, buttons, navigation, cards)
• Composed patterns (reusable UI assemblies used across journeys)

This model prioritises how designers actually work—reducing friction while still supporting scalability and governance.

Core principles

Foundational system principles

Colour as a system primitive

Colour forms a critical layer of system governance. In this implementation, all visual elements were bound to a structured token system supporting both light and dark themes.

Centralising colour through Figma styles ensured that updates could be made safely at scale, with changes propagating instantly across all dependent components and products. This significantly reduced inconsistency risk in a large, multi-team environment.

Core principles

Stroke, fill, and visual hierarchy

Stroke and fill styles were intentionally decoupled to allow for more precise control of visual hierarchy, particularly in dark mode contexts where perceptual contrast can degrade clarity.

Rather than relying purely on algorithmic colour derivation, decisions were validated through visual calibration against real interface contexts—ensuring accessibility, legibility, and hierarchy integrity across environments.

Core principles

Naming and system taxonomy

A scalable design system depends heavily on consistent, predictable naming conventions that align design, development, and product language.

The naming structure was designed to reflect how teams think about products rather than abstract system theory, ensuring discoverability and reducing cognitive load.

Example structure:

• Acme Design System / Light / Button / Primary
• Acme Design System / Light / Typography / Body / Secondary
• Acme Design System / Light / Colour / Surface / Elevated

This approach ensured parity between Figma, development components, and documentation layers, improving cross-functional alignment.

Core principles

Component architecture

Each component was designed as a composable system rather than a static asset.

For example, a button component is composed of:

• Design token-driven fill and stroke styles
• Typography styles for labels
• Icon components where required
• Variant logic for state and hierarchy

This approach ensures that updates are applied at the system level rather than at the instance level, significantly improving maintainability at scale.

A key principle was strict separation of concerns—avoiding over-styling components and ensuring each layer remains independently governable.

Core principles

Grid and spacing system

Spacing is one of the most important determinants of visual consistency and usability in interface design.

The system was built on an 8pt grid foundation, with 4pt increments used selectively where finer control was required.

This approach provides:

• Predictable spatial rhythm across interfaces
• Stronger visual hierarchy and readability
• Reduced decision-making overhead for designers
• Scalable consistency across responsive layouts

At scale, spacing systems become a critical enabler of design velocity and coherence across teams.

Wrap up

From design to implementation (Figma → Storybook)

A design system only delivers value when tightly integrated into the development lifecycle.

The implementation strategy prioritised early alignment between design and engineering, embedding the component library into development workflows from the outset rather than retrofitting after UI completion.

In practice:

• Components were designed and maintained in Figma as the source of truth
• Design artefacts were translated into coded components
• Storybook (and similar tooling such as Widgetbook) was used as a live documentation layer

This created a shared system of record between design and engineering, enabling real-time validation, reducing ambiguity, and improving release confidence.

Intro

Global Game Developers Platform

As a contracted Senior UX/UI Designer for Portaltech, I worked on the greenfield project PlayStation Partners platform — a large-scale enterprise product used by game developers and publishers to self-publish content across the PlayStation ecosystem worldwide. The platform acted as a centralised hub where developers could upload game builds, manage regional assets, submit marketing collateral, and distribute content across the PlayStation Network for Europe, North America, Japan, and Asia.

The project represented a major strategic milestone for Sony PlayStation, consolidating four previously disconnected regional systems into a single unified global platform. It was also a technically and organisationally complex programme that had previously failed in both the US and Japan, making successful delivery a significant achievement for the wider team.

Working as part of a joint collaboration between Portaltech, Accenture, and Sony PlayStation, I operated within a large agile product team made up of UX designers, UI designers, front-end developers, back-end engineers, business analysts, and technical leads. Much of the project was delivered onsite at Sony PlayStation’s London headquarters on Oxford Street, enabling close day-to-day collaboration with stakeholders and product owners throughout discovery and delivery.

The challenge

My role

My role focused on leading UX across several major release workstreams, owning the design of complex release-based workflows and developer journeys across multiple work packages. The platform itself was highly operational and data-heavy, requiring developers to manage large volumes of digital assets, metadata, localisation requirements, compliance information, and region-specific publishing rules. A core challenge was simplifying these complex workflows into intuitive, scalable user journeys that could support both experienced publishers and smaller independent studios.

During the initial discovery phase, I facilitated workshops, mapped user journeys, and rapidly prototyped concepts to validate workflows with stakeholders and external PlayStation Partners. Working closely with business analysts and engineering teams, I translated technical requirements into wireframes, interactive flows, and high-fidelity prototypes. Extensive usability testing was conducted with external partners through Foolproof, helping us validate assumptions and refine the experience through continuous iteration.

One of the key successes of the project was establishing scalable UX patterns for highly complex publishing and release-management tasks. I designed workflows that balanced flexibility with clarity, using familiar interaction patterns and progressive disclosure to reduce cognitive load across large operational journeys. This helped simplify tasks such as regional asset management, localisation handling, and multi-market publishing approvals.

Following the UX discovery phase, I moved into visual design and prototyping, creating high-fidelity interfaces using Sketch and InVision, while working within an evolving design system to ensure consistency across the platform. I also collaborated closely with front-end developers to support design implementation and ensure fidelity between design and production.

Overview

Enterprise scale

The project introduced me to new collaborative workflows and tooling at enterprise scale, including extensive use of OmniGraffle for rapid journey mapping and workflow visualisation. In a highly workshop-driven environment, OmniGraffle proved particularly effective for quickly iterating on large, interconnected user flows without the overhead of more interaction-heavy prototyping tools. This allowed the UX team to work fluidly with stakeholders in real time while maintaining momentum across discovery sessions.

Over the course of the engagement, I became a key UX contact for multiple release streams, helping coordinate design delivery across stakeholders, developers, and product teams while maintaining alignment with business objectives and technical constraints. Working so closely with Sony stakeholders onsite provided invaluable exposure to enterprise-scale product development and reinforced the importance of collaboration, adaptability, and iterative design within complex global programmes.

The final platform successfully unified PlayStation’s regional developer ecosystems into a single scalable solution, improving operational efficiency for both Sony and its publishing partners while creating a far more streamlined and consistent developer experience globally.

Intro

Replatforming a payments system for National Car Parks

As contracted lead UX/UI designer for Keytree (Deloitte), I was responsible for leading the UX and interface design delivery for a new J-SOX compliant online payments platform for National Car Parks (NCP), working as part of the consultancy team. The project involved redesigning and rebuilding NCP’s internal payment operations system from the ground up following the company’s acquisition by a Japanese parent organisation, requiring the platform to comply with strict Japanese financial governance and auditing regulations.

Unlike a traditional replatforming initiative, this was a complete product rebuild focused on achieving full J-SOX compliance — a governance framework designed to enforce transparency, accountability, and “four-eyes” approval processes across all financial operations. The system functioned similarly to enterprise banking and financial control platforms, requiring highly structured workflows, robust auditability, and clear operational oversight.

The challenge

My role

The platform was designed specifically for NCP operational staff managing daily financial transactions, payment reconciliation, and machine auditing across multiple car park locations. Because the application was only accessible on-site within controlled environments, the experience was optimised for fixed-width desktop displays at a minimum resolution of 1280px, allowing us to focus on dense operational workflows and data-heavy interfaces without compromising usability.

Leading the UX/UI workstream, I acted as the primary point of contact for design delivery between NCP stakeholders, the Keytree product team, and engineering. I designed and handed off production-ready interfaces using Sketch and Zeplin, ensuring all outputs aligned with NCP’s established brand guidelines while also supporting accessibility, usability, and compliance requirements.

Discovery

Enterprise scale

The discovery phase began through collaborative MVP workshops at the client’s London offices, where we worked closely with stakeholders to define requirements, workflows, and operational priorities. As the Covid-19 pandemic shifted teams into remote working, the project transitioned fully online, requiring close daily collaboration through virtual workshops and agile ceremonies using Microsoft Teams. I coordinated closely with both NCP’s product stakeholders and the wider Keytree delivery team to maintain alignment across UX, engineering, and business objectives.

Part of my role involved translating complex operational and compliance requirements into scalable user journeys and product workflows. After analysing the initial requirements gathered by a third-party consultancy, I mapped high-level user journeys before breaking them down into feature-level flows, Jira stories, wireframes, and interactive prototypes. From there, I evolved the concepts into development-ready UI designs and collaborated directly with engineering teams throughout implementation.

Discovery

Research

A particularly valuable part of the project involved onsite research sessions at NCP’s Manchester operations centres, where I was able to observe operational workflows firsthand, interview users, and document real-world processes. This immersion helped uncover pain points, inefficiencies, and edge cases that would have been difficult to identify through stakeholder workshops alone. By spending time directly with operational staff, I was able to design workflows that better reflected real user behaviour and environmental constraints.

User feedback became a core part of the agile delivery process. Once wireframes and prototype flows were defined, NCP facilitated walkthrough and testing sessions with operational users, allowing us to gather rapid feedback and continuously refine the experience within active sprint cycles. This iterative approach helped ensure the platform remained intuitive and efficient despite the complexity of the underlying compliance requirements.

Intro

My role

Joining The Zone Agency on a contract as a lead UI designer, I began work on Phase 2 of the large-scale replatforming of the South West Trains website, which launched in early 2017. The programme focused on modernising the customer experience for one of the UK’s busiest rail operators through a responsive, mobile-first digital platform designed to support both transactional and account-based user journeys.

The project followed a phased delivery approach. While Phase 1 focused primarily on core booking functionality and journey search, my role centred on Phase 2 — designing the authenticated customer experience, including account dashboards, ecommerce flows, smartcard management, and railcard journeys. The objective was to create a seamless and scalable account ecosystem that simplified complex travel management tasks while aligning with established brand and UI guidelines.

The challenge

UI design

Working closely with Zone’s internal product, UX, and engineering teams, as well as external partners and client stakeholders, I led the design delivery across several key customer journeys. Starting from high-level journey maps and service blueprints, I translated technical requirements and business objectives into polished, high-fidelity interface designs ready for development.

A core part of the role involved rapidly evolving concepts into production-ready experiences within an agile delivery environment. Using established component libraries and contributing new reusable UI patterns where needed, I designed responsive journeys across multiple breakpoints with a strong mobile-first approach. This included end-to-end flows for registration, login, My Account dashboards, saved journeys, smartcard management, and railcard functionality.

Discovery

High fidelity

Using an established component library, I defined user flows, interactions and error states, and responsive design for developer handoff, creating clickable prototypes and ensuring all deliverables were implementation-ready and aligned with the wider design system. Collaboration with developers was highly iterative, enabling quick feedback loops and ensuring design intent was maintained throughout build and QA phases.

One of the key challenges of the project was balancing operational complexity with ease of use. Rail travel platforms often involve fragmented user journeys, technical constraints, and dense information architecture, so a major focus was simplifying customer interactions while maintaining clarity across transactional and account-management tasks. Through close collaboration with product and technical teams, we identified friction points early and refined journeys to improve usability, consistency, and accessibility across devices.

Execution

Shipping

The project also required strong stakeholder management and communication skills, as designs needed to move quickly from concept to client approval within tight delivery timelines. I worked closely with stakeholders to visualise solutions rapidly, gather feedback efficiently, and iterate designs without compromising quality or scalability.

The final product delivered a significantly more modern and intuitive digital experience that improved how customers managed journeys, accounts, and travel products online. The work established scalable design patterns that supported the wider platform ecosystem while helping modernise the overall customer experience for one of the UK’s leading rail operators.

Intro

Supporting UX

While contracting on the BT project at Jellyfish, I contributed to the redesign and replatforming of the new Nintendo UK Store, which launched in 2021. The project focused on modernising Nintendo’s ecommerce experience through a mobile-first approach designed to improve customer engagement, streamline purchasing journeys, and better support the evolving ways users discover and buy games online.

Joining the project during active delivery, I worked in a supporting Lead UX/UI capacity within an established multi-disciplinary product team. My focus was primarily on the content experience across the platform, helping shape responsive content journeys and scalable UX patterns that aligned with the wider ecommerce ecosystem.

The challenge

UX design

Working closely with product managers, UX leads, developers, and client stakeholders, I translated research findings and business requirements into responsive wireframes and UX flows using Figma. This included designing and implementing reusable content components, refining responsive layouts, and ensuring consistency across mobile and desktop experiences.

A major objective of the replatforming initiative was addressing the shortcomings of the previous platform, originally launched in 2013, which no longer met modern ecommerce expectations — particularly on mobile devices. User behaviour had shifted significantly towards mobile browsing, content consumption, and purchasing, making a mobile-first strategy essential to improving engagement and conversion.

Design

Wireframing module templates

The redesigned experience introduced a far more modern and flexible content ecosystem, with a stronger emphasis on rich media, personalisation, and responsive interaction patterns. Video content became a much more prominent part of the customer journey, requiring mobile-optimised content modules, responsive media handling, and scalable component behaviour across different screen sizes and content types.

Working collaboratively across UX, visual design, and engineering, I helped ensure that content experiences integrated seamlessly with broader ecommerce flows, including navigation, discovery, and checkout journeys. A key focus throughout the project was maintaining clarity and usability across increasingly content-rich experiences while reducing friction in the path to purchase.

Alignment

Execution

Because the platform served a large and highly engaged gaming audience, consistency and familiarity in interaction design were critical. We relied heavily on user research conducted by Jellyfish to validate interaction patterns, content hierarchy, and navigation structures, helping create experiences that felt intuitive and performant across devices.

The final platform delivered a significantly improved customer experience compared to the legacy store, with faster and more consistent responsive journeys, improved mobile usability, enhanced discoverability of products and content, and a more streamlined checkout experience. The redesign also supported broader commercial objectives by helping reduce basket abandonment and improving engagement with Nintendo’s expanding catalogue of digital and physical products.

Afterthoughts

Reflections

Having previously worked on enterprise gaming platforms for Sony PlayStation, contributing to Nintendo’s ecommerce ecosystem provided further experience designing for large-scale gaming audiences and reinforced my expertise in creating scalable, user-centred digital products within highly recognisable global brands.

Overview

Replatforming preqin.com - an old .net platform

As a Lead UX/UI Designer, I played a key role in the redesign and replatforming of the global Preqin website, launched in 2020. Preqin is one of the world's leading providers of data and intelligence for the private capital market, supporting investors, hedge funds, fund managers, and financial institutions with critical market insights — including the growing demand for ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investment strategies.

The project centred around transforming an outdated, hard-coded .NET platform into a modern, scalable, and fully responsive digital ecosystem. The legacy website lacked CMS flexibility, was not mobile-optimised, and created significant operational bottlenecks for the marketing team. Our objective was to design and deliver a future-proof platform that empowered internal teams while significantly improving the user experience across content discovery, ecommerce, and event engagement.

The challenge

A platform holding the business back

The legacy platform presented three compounding problems. First, the hard-coded .NET architecture meant every content change required engineering involvement, creating a bottleneck that slowed the marketing team's ability to respond to market events and campaign opportunities. Second, the site was not mobile-optimised — a significant gap for a global audience of investment professionals accessing data across devices. Third, there was no integrated ecommerce or events capability, forcing workarounds that fragmented the user experience.

The new platform needed to solve all three simultaneously: introduce CMS flexibility, deliver a fully responsive experience, and integrate ecommerce and events into a single coherent ecosystem.

My role

End-to-end UX strategy and delivery

Working from concept through to delivery, I helped lead the UX strategy and interface design process across the full product lifecycle. The new platform introduced:

• A fully editable CMS architecture integrated with Preqin's Amazon cloud-based data infrastructure
• A custom events engine for managing and promoting global events
• Full Shopify ecommerce integration for data subscriptions and publications
• A scalable design system and visual language to support long-term platform growth

The result was a far more agile and scalable experience that enabled the marketing team to independently manage content, campaigns, and ecommerce workflows without development dependency.

Process

Agile delivery at pace

Collaborating closely with stakeholders, developers, product teams, and marketing leadership, I worked in agile sprint cycles alongside an offshore engineering team in Ukraine. Operating one to two sprints ahead of development, I created detailed user flows, service blueprints, wireframes, and high-fidelity clickable prototypes in Axure RP to align business goals with technical feasibility and user needs.

I also partnered closely with UI designers to evolve the visual language and establish scalable style guides that improved consistency across the platform.

Research & insight

Letting data lead the design decisions

A major focus of the project was leveraging analytics and user insight to inform design decisions. Because this was a replatforming initiative, we had access to substantial behavioural data from the existing platform — including usability testing findings, heatmaps, and Google Analytics. This allowed us to identify key friction points across user journeys, particularly within content discovery and ecommerce flows.

By analysing navigation behaviour, engagement hotspots, and drop-off patterns, we were able to redesign critical pathways to:

• Improve content discoverability across research and data products
• Streamline ecommerce interactions and reduce checkout friction
• Optimise high-traffic landing pages for conversion across devices
• Reduce cognitive load across complex multi-step journeys

Collaboration

Bridging design, engineering, and business

Throughout the project, I facilitated collaboration between UX, UI, engineering, and business stakeholders, ensuring design quality remained high through iterative testing and continuous refinement. This required balancing the ambitions of marketing leadership with the technical constraints of the engineering team — often translating complex requirements into clear, deliverable design decisions within tight sprint timelines.

Following launch, we continued evolving the platform through usability feedback, responsive optimisation, and ongoing improvements to the design system to support future scalability.

Outcome

A platform built for growth

The outcome was a modern, responsive enterprise platform that significantly improved usability, operational efficiency, and content management flexibility — positioning Preqin to better support its rapidly growing global audience and digital product ecosystem.

Key outcomes included:

• Full CMS control returned to the marketing team without engineering dependency
• Mobile-optimised experience across all content and ecommerce journeys
• Integrated Shopify ecommerce and custom events engine within a single platform
• Scalable design system and style guide supporting ongoing product development
• Measurable reductions in friction across key content discovery and conversion pathways