Lead designer at Digiata / Twenty57
Building fast is easy now. Knowing what good looks like isn’t.
When everyone can move quickly, the advantage is clarity of thinking, quality of design, and turning what the business needs into software people can actually use. My work centres on using AI to improve how organisations sell, design and deliver software, particularly in the complex financial services environments Digiata focuses on.
I never studied software or design. My degree is a master’s in politics, and politics is about people. I started writing code in 1993 anyway, and for years that was the job.
Then I worked on a global marketing platform for Diageo. With every feature we added, it got harder to use. When I stepped back, the reason was plain: nobody in the organisation was thinking about the user. Everything revolved around the features. So in 2008, when a chance came up to work with Flow Interactive, a UK UX consultancy, I took it and changed direction.
I never stopped building things of my own. The current one is openapidesigner.com. I use AI outside work too, on legal, financial and personal problems. The part of the work I enjoy most is teaching: workshops, articles, and now training Digiata’s teams to design with AI.
Between what the business needs, what the technology allows and what people can use. Finding the one that works for all three is the most valuable thing a designer does.
AI produces impressive work at every stage of design. Deciding what good looks like is still our job, and switching off to accept the output is the worst thing a professional can do.
It must be used to enhance what people already know, not replace them.
Demonstration beats explanation. AI-generated prototypes are a major step forward in design communication.
Since completing AI for Design Workflows training (Nielsen Norman Group) in November 2025, I have been redesigning Digiata’s design approach to integrate AI into customer research, requirements discovery and documentation, and rapid prototyping.
The outcome is an AI-enabled, agentic requirements and prototyping workflow that turns business intent into specification documents, design systems, wireframes and interactive, clickable prototypes. It contains 27 unique, industry-standard review and analyse methodologies that help software professionals reduce ambiguity and sharpen the results. The source is on GitHub.
What the business needs, in its own words
Run industry-standard requirements reviews and analyses against source documents and requirements
PRDs, requiremnents and specification documents
The visual elements screens are built from
Structure and flow, screen by screen
Interactive and clickable
Teams at Digiata and Digiata customers experience core workflows early, reducing ambiguity, improving alignment, and lowering delivery risk.
Conversations shift from explanation to demonstration.
Early prototyping and AI-assisted explorations speed up research while human judgement and UX quality stay at the centre.
Well-defined requirements and prototypes act as a shared source of truth, reducing miscommunication, rework, and late-stage changes.
I am leading Digiata’s skills transformation to AI-augmented design and development. The programme adds AI skills to the ones our designers and engineers already have, building on their knowledge rather than replacing it. Since May 2026 I have been training Digiata software designers and engineers to use the workflow.
What I push hardest in training is not a prompt or a tool. It’s not switching off. The output looks impressive at every stage, so accepting it is easy. Defining what good looks like, and holding the AI to it, is the skill people now need to practise.
years experience
years experience
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years experience
I have worked as the lead designer in the Digiata/Twenty57 design teams for multiple products and custom developments for over a decade. I am responsible for the design of all software products and work with clients, product owners, developers, designers and stakeholders.
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A selection of my articles. Find them on Medium, UX Bootcamp or Hackernoon
For side projects I do everything, the design, front-, backend development, maintenance and marketing.
