A design system that remembers why

For an enterprise ML platform: a token-governed component system with numbered rules, an institutional memory that humans and AI agents both read before touching a pixel, and a prototyping pipeline where anyone on the team types plain English and gets real components back.

Role

Design Lead

Company

Enterprise AI platform

Timeframe

2026 · 100+ shipped waves

Built with

The frontend team

• 3,491 CSS custom properties resolve through a three-layer chain — which is why dark mode cost zero component code.
• 91 numbered rules and an append-only decisions log: 378 documents, 6,683 cross-links, read by people and machines.
• Prototyping loop of ~15 seconds per iteration — designers and PMs build with real components by typing plain English.

Four years inside a data platform

Lead product designer across two pods of Astrato, a Snowflake-native analytics platform — 40+ features, from the join canvas that untangled data modelling to an AI assistant that shows its SQL instead of hiding it.

Role

Lead Product Designer · UX Engineer

Client

Astrato, by Vizlib

Duration

Over four years

Scope

40+ features · two pods

• The join canvas redesign started from a real backlog ticket (VK-4532): joins now route around tables, connect from any side, and take 4 clicks to create.
• Moderated UserTesting sessions with attention heatmaps; 80% of participants rated the redesigned task easy.
• Two pods, one designer: data preparation (team of 9) and data visualization (team of 20).

Youth mental health, two-sided

A service for an NHS child & adolescent mental-health team: a genuinely private mood diary for teenagers, and a dashboard that gives clinicians the right information without adding workload. Research-led, aligned to the GDS Service Standard.

Role

User Researcher · UI Designer

Client

NHS trust (anonymised)

Duration

6 months, discovery → beta

Framework

GDS Service Standard

• Interviews with 8 clinicians, 8 young patients and 3 parents; surveys of 30 clinicians and 40 young people & parents.
• Three co-design workshops — 12 clinicians in one, 8 teens in another — plus a privacy design that handled Gillick competence and parental consent.
• Beta pilot in one clinic: 3 clinicians, 10 patients, 8 parents, three weeks of real use.

Pricing a group holiday honestly

Sole designer for the UK villa-holiday specialist: their first mobile app, from scratch, and a full web overhaul — rebuilt around one problem. Group bookings kept changing price for reasons nobody could see, and families were abandoning trips over it.

Role

Sole Designer · end to end

Client

Villa Plus

Duration

Under a year

Scope

First mobile app + web overhaul

• A Change Tracker attributes every price movement to the action that caused it — "price rose · adult added".
• Live flight pricing with honest badges ("price rose in the last day") and a 10-minute price hold for time-sensitive fares.
• 5 of 5 usability-test participants completed the full 15-person group booking unaided.

The UX Files

Twenty real UX problems from a production ML platform — two paginations on one table, an invisible primary button, a dark mode that collapsed across 83 files — each rebuilt broken so you can feel it, then flipped to the shipped fix. Every one cites the rule it produced.

Format

Interactive deck · 44 slides

Problems

20, root-caused

Everyone Builds

An interactive class that teaches atomic design to non-designers — engineers, PMs, sales. Six playable labs: drag atoms into molecules, retheme a page with one token, type plain English and watch a robot build the page (it refuses Comic Sans). The reason nobody at the company waits for a designer any more.

Format

Interactive class · 6 labs

Audience

The whole company

From Chaos to Canon

The design-system story as a site that practises what it preaches — built with the system's own token values. Token foundations, the atomic ladder, a searchable component library, and a draggable before/after of the same dashboard two years of UX debt apart.

Format

Story site · 9 sections

Built

With its own tokens