Turning a code-driven product into a user-centred platform
A global fintech with a powerful but code-driven product, and little formal UX. Over several years I built the design organisation, raised the company's design maturity, moved the platform toward a user-centred SaaS experience, and now lead its design through the shift to agentic AI.
Raised company-wide design maturity from NN/g Level 2 to Level 4 in three years, with a +20-point average System Usability Scale uplift across releases and design-to-dev time cut by around 30%.
Context
Xceptor builds process-automation software for major financial institutions: capable, deeply technical, and historically driven by configuration and code rather than by interface. When I joined as Head of User Experience, UX existed but wasn’t yet a strategic function. There was no design organisation to speak of, no design system, no shared measure of whether the product was actually getting easier to use.
The opportunity was bigger than a single redesign. It was to make user experience something the company could do reliably, and to use that capability to help move a legacy, code-driven system toward a user-first SaaS platform.
Approach
Make UX a strategy, not a service
I defined and executed a company-wide UX strategy and design vision, and worked with the C-suite and product leadership to embed UX KPIs into corporate OKRs. That’s the difference between design being asked to make things pretty and design helping decide what gets built, with research insights shaping the roadmap directly.
Build the team that makes it durable
A practice is only as resilient as the people running it. I built Xceptor’s first global UX organisation (six designers and researchers across the UK and South Africa) and invested heavily in keeping it: career frameworks, coaching, performance reviews, and over 600 one-to-ones. Annual turnover stayed under 7%, less than half the company average.
Measure everything, then prove it
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. I introduced System Usability Scale benchmarks across every product release, stood up a UX metrics dashboard for continuous improvement and leadership reporting, and led 30+ formal usability and benchmarking studies that fed prioritisation and cut rework across squads. I also built a 30-item accessibility and 10-point heuristic evaluation framework that became the standard for design QA.
Give the work a foundation
I created Xceptor’s first design system, unifying brand, accessibility, and interaction standards across micro front-ends, reducing design-to-dev time by around 30% and giving the legacy-to-cloud transformation a coherent surface to land on.
Build an AI-native design practice
I rebuilt how the team works around AI. I designed and shipped an AI-native design-operations stack (tooling that helps the team create, audit, and report design work to a consistent standard, with no engineering support) and pushed AI through research and prototyping so a small function could move at the pace of a much larger one (design-cycle and insight turnaround improved by 40%+). I also run AI-assisted concept workshops live with senior client executives, at COO, CTO, and MD level in major financial institutions, producing branded, interactive concepts in the room and turning the response into roadmap signal.
Design the product’s AI, responsibly
As the platform moved toward agentic AI, with features that don’t just surface information but take action, the hardest problem stopped being the interface and became trust. I drove and articulated a human-in-the-loop model for how that AI should behave: it recommends, then acts only with human approval, and operates autonomously only where that’s genuinely safe, always with a named person accountable and a complete audit trail. In high-stakes financial operations, “AI suggests, humans approve” is what makes automation adoptable. I shaped that principle into the product’s UX, its governance model, and the language leadership uses to explain it.
Outcome
In three years, Xceptor’s design maturity rose from NN/g Level 2 (“Limited”) to Level 4 (“Structured”), a structural change in how the company builds rather than a one-off polish. Redesigns delivered an average +20-point SUS improvement, design-to-dev time fell ~30%, and research turnaround sped up by 40%+. And the global team I built held its turnover to less than half the company average, giving Xceptor design capability that compounds rather than churns.
Most importantly, UX moved from the edge of the process to the centre of it: represented in executive decision forums, measured against business outcomes, and trusted to help steer a financial-software platform’s move to the cloud, and now to define how it adopts AI without losing the trust of the people who depend on it.