Shad Abbaslou

Product Design Lead · Open Innovation · London

• Built and maintain the design language end to end: the design system, the component library, the documentation and the governance that keeps five products and nine designers speaking one language.
• AI agents, prompts and workflows are part of the role: the design and product teams build with them every day, and I build and maintain them.
• Rebuilt the platform's frontend language with the frontend team: 3,396 design tokens in a three-layer chain, a six-layer atomic hierarchy, 91 numbered rules, and dark mode shipped without touching component code.
• Built an institutional memory (the DS-Brain) of 378 documents and 6,683 cross-links, read by engineers and AI agents alike, with an append-only decisions log.
• Shipped an AI prototyping workflow that took the designer off the critical path: a PM or designer types one sentence and gets a working Storybook prototype built from production components in about 15 seconds, so nothing in the loop waits for a designer and nothing it produces needs rebuilding.
• Taught the whole company atomic design through an interactive class (engineers, PMs, sales).

Case file: withcontexts.com/work/oi-design-system

Lead Product Designer · Astrato, by Vizlib · London

• Sole designer across both delivery pods of a Snowflake-native analytics platform, 29 people in teams of 9 and 20, for over three years.
• 4 of 5 participants rated the redesigned modelling task easy, on tape: rebuilt the data-modelling join canvas from its backlog ticket down and validated it in moderated usability testing sessions with attention heatmaps.
• Designed Astrato Insights, the platform's AI assistant, with the SQL shown and editable rather than hidden.
• Built and owned the component libraries; specs shipped as designed.
• The business case was redundancy: teams were independently replicating dashboards the model could not express, producing duplicate data views and the query bill to match. Centralising that into one Data Explorer was the headline result of the redesign.

Case file: withcontexts.com/work/astrato · Novo Nordisk and JBS: withcontexts.com/work/novo-nordisk, withcontexts.com/work/jbs

Product Designer · NHS trust, CAMHS (anonymised) · London

• Ran discovery to beta for a two-sided youth mental-health service: 19 interview sessions with 12 people, 70 survey responses, three co-design workshops, aligned to the GDS Service Standard.
• Designed the privacy model (Gillick competence, parental consent, sharing only by explicit choice) and the clinician dashboard that adds no workload.
• Beta shipped to a live clinic: 3 clinicians, 10 patients, 8 parents over three weeks.
• 94% of those beta users said the system should continue in use. Patients wrote four journal entries a week each, in a product deliberately built with no streaks and no escalating reminders.

Case file: withcontexts.com/work/safe-space

Sole Designer · Villa Plus · London

• Designed the company's first mobile app from scratch and overhauled the web booking flow, end to end.
• Rebuilt group pricing around trust: a Change Tracker attributing every price movement, honest flight-price badges, a 10-minute price hold.
• All 5 usability-test participants completed the full 15-person group booking unaided.
• At launch: conversion up 12% for groups of 5 to 9 and 18% for 10 or more.
• Drop-off from flight selection to payment down 30%, price-related support queries down 25%, booking NPS up 15 points.

UX Designer · Travel Direct, then DTC Design · London

• Product and UX design across travel and agency work, where the ten years start: booking flows, marketing sites and client work.