©SktchFrst - About | User-Centric Designer

The systems teams depend on at 2 a.m. shouldn't be the ones they work around. I design the replacements

10 years in complex, data-rich enterprise systems—banking, energy, insurance and maritime—before this, 10 year in B2C, travel, exchange betting and health information. I work where the domain is dense, the constraints are real, and the design problem is substantive.

The work I'm consistently drawn to: retiring legacy tooling that's accumulated workarounds, restructuring information architecture for operational and risk contexts, designing dashboards and workflows for environments where shipping the wrong thing is expensive. I work directly with SMEs, product owners and engineering leads—translating domain and technical requirements into structured interaction models and production-ready UI.

Information architecture

How data moves, how decisions get made, where the existing structure breaks down. Before screens.

Operational dashboard design

Interfaces for people working under time pressure. Speed and legibility matter more than polish.

Legacy migration

Retiring fragmented tooling. Usually means understanding why the old system worked before changing anything.

Domain-led discovery

Working with operators, engineers and SMEs. The domain knowledge is with the people using the system.

— Background

My foundation is unusual for a designer—a year of computing and structural engineering before reading architecture at the University of Westminster. That hybrid shows up in how I think about structure, constraint, and translating specialist knowledge into built form. It explains the work I keep returning to: dense IA, taxonomy that has to absorb drift, workflow modelling for systems that real people rely on under load.

A pattern of building practices, not just delivering projects. At Rule Financial I helped grow a UX practice from one designer to a multidisciplined team of eighteen—designers, developers and business analysts—on a Tier-1 bank Market Risk engagement. The work that interests me is the kind that needs more than one person and stays in production for years.

A consistent return to domain-dense work. Banking trade operations, energy power management, insurance quote-to-policy, maritime IoT across 150+ vessels. The pattern is intentional—I'm most effective where the SMEs know things I have to learn from them, and where the design problem isn't visible from the outside.

— Now

Mid-2025 to mid-2026 has been a deliberate career break following intensive enterprise delivery. I've been integrating AI-assisted methods into research synthesis, wireframing, design iteration and prototype work—prompt-structured workflows that compress execution time on bounded tasks. The principle that holds: AI shifts execution, not judgement. The designer still owns the constraint reading and the positions taken under pushback.

Alongside that, I've continued freelance illustration and visual concept work, and mentored designers on translating specialist domain requirements into structured digital experiences.

— Career

2025–
present

Planned Break

Travel & Family — Freelance / up-skilling

2015–2024

Chapter Two

Operational and enterprise systems

2019–2024

EDF Trading brought three interconnected products: Power Position Management, Trade Limits and Breach Reporting, Market and Quotes Data Analysis. Reduced manual nomination tasks by 70–80%. Retired spreadsheet-based tracking. Introduced a shared UI asset library. The decisions that mattered most were structural—what not to show by default, which alerts to suppress, where automation should stop.

Deutsche Bank CIB via HCL: delivered the CCO data governance platform across Risk, Finance and Treasury. Reduced publication processing time by 75%. Reduced consumer onboarding from weeks to days — an 80% reduction.

2017–2019

GFT: led experience design for a commercial truck insurance web application—quotes, deduplication, pixel-ready delivery. 90POE followed: design lead across Planned Maintenance and Vessel Performance platforms for Zodiac Maritime—130+ vessels, crew at sea and onshore. Target 5–8% CAPEX reduction in year one.

2016–2019

Two overlapping engagements. Just Eat: interaction and visual design improvements across UK and international products, A/B testing support. EY Seren: a private wealth iPad app for BNPP Fortis Relationship Managers in Singapore, led remotely from London; 22 interactive presentations for a Future of Insurance project in the US; Open Banking PSD2 research; and a short L&G retirement website refresh. Largely concept and presentation rather than shipping product.

2015–2016

Owned UX for Betfair's InPlay Exchange Graph Analytics Tool—live price and volume tracking across thousands of markets for high-value traders. MVP through rollout. Where operational speed and information density became concrete as design problems.

2010–2015

Chapter One · B

Enterprise transition

2012–2015

A sequence of shorter engagements across different domains. Hotels.com: user research and a high-fidelity interaction prototype for a hotel booking app. Adaptive Lab: onboarding experience for the Barclays Business Credit Portal. Bupa: health information content migration into Sitecore, mobile-first. Camelot: interaction design for the National Lottery iPhone app—five products, over a million monthly users.

2010–2013

Rule Financial: led UX innovation workshops across finance and banking clients—tablet, mobile and desktop—with Deutsche Bank and HSBC as primary clients. Mostly conceptual and exploratory work that established the domain vocabulary for the enterprise engagements that followed.

2003–2010

Chapter One · A

Interactive and digital design

2007–2010

Betfair Games: produced interactive onboarding guides for new exchange users. Evolution Gaming followed: led the redesign of virtual interfaces for live video casino products across William Hill and Victor Chandler. First work involving live user behaviour under real-time conditions.

2003–2007

Digit London first: character design and storyboards for Galleries of Justice. LEGO followed for just under two years—promotional sites, seasonal animations and illustrated online comics across London and Denmark. Virgin.net: rebuilt the Flash e-cards interface and cut card update time from an hour to fifteen minutes. Universal Music: Flash teasers, e-cards and mini-sites for artists including The Who and Sugababes.