About
The best complex systems don't feel complex. Not because the complexity has been hidden, but because everything is exactly where you'd expect it, visible exactly when you need it. That's the problem I find most interesting, and the one I work on every day at Coutts, as a senior designer leading on key strategic projects across private and commercial banking.
How I got here
I started with a maths degree, which surprises people until I explain what pure maths is actually about: not calculation, but looking beyond the surface to find the structure underneath, and asking what a problem is really asking. That instinct has shaped everything since.
What I hadn't expected was how well that structural thinking translated. A data and analytics internship at RBS put it to work on human behaviour: running A/B tests and working out which changes were real and which were noise.
The NatWest graduate programme put me in account opening: current accounts, then the joint loans project, then savings. Each product type brought a completely different user mindset, and that changed how I designed for each one.
Talent Attraction was a real change of conditions: sole designer, no researchers or content designers alongside me. It pushed me to develop skills I'd previously been able to rely on others for.
Coutts brought me back into a full design function, now as a senior designer working across genuinely complex platforms. The problems are harder, the constraints are layered, and I find the challenge energising.
BSc Mathematics & Statistics
University of Sheffield
Technology Solutions Intern
RBS (now NatWest Group)
Technology & Innovation Graduate
NatWest Group
UX Designer
Online Account Opening, Retail Banking, NatWest Group
UX Designer
Talent Attraction Digital, NatWest Group
Senior Product Designer
Coutts Digital Experience, NatWest Group
How I work
The brief is a starting point. Before I open Figma, I want to understand what the problem is actually asking, using whatever's available: existing data, conversations with people closest to the problem, competitor analysis, analogous products in adjacent sectors. On the projects I'm most proud of, that changed what we were designing entirely.
Working in financial services means designing products where trust is structural, not aspirational. People are sharing financial data, making legally binding commitments, giving access to accounts. The stakes of getting it wrong are real. That discipline of designing for the moment when a user has to commit to something that genuinely matters shapes how I approach every brief.
A lot of the platforms I work on have no simple answer to who the user is. There's the colleague configuring a system, the administrator managing it, the client relying on it, and a regulatory framework constraining all three. Getting that right means working with product, engineering, legal and risk from the start, not as a handoff, but as an ongoing conversation where design decisions get made together. The most useful thing complex platform work has taught me is that the interesting design problems almost never live where the brief says they do.
Two moments where understanding the real situation changed what we designed.
One conversation with the team who lived in the tool every day completely reshaped the redesign. It turned out 95% of administrator setups were configurationally identical.
Remote research during COVID showed us the reality: people applying from their kitchens, kids in the background, one partner calling through from another room. Legal had pictured a very different scene.
Tools and methods
Figma for design; UserZoom for unmoderated research and click tests; FigJam for synthesis and workshops. I use Figma Make for rapid AI-assisted prototyping. This portfolio was built with Claude, giving me direct experience of what AI collaboration actually means in a design and build process, not just as a writing aid.
Tutoring and mentoring
"Will this build confidence or knock it?"
I volunteer as a maths tutor with Action Tutoring, working with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds at critical points in their education. Watching a student who goes quiet when unsure gradually start answering freely, once they realise getting something wrong is met with curiosity rather than judgement, is one of the best things I've done. The same question carries into how I mentor junior designers: showing work in progress is the only way to learn, and mid-way messiness is good.
Eight years designing for financial services, most recently as Senior Product Designer at Coutts. I do my best work on products with real operational weight: layered constraints, multiple stakeholders, problems that look deceptively simple until you get close. If that sounds like where you work, I'd like to hear from you.