High-density data, high-stakes decisions

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The platform handles a complex, multi-staged process — assessor selection, competency grading, interviews, and reporting — across a hierarchy of judges, practitioners, and administrators. Getting the interface wrong had real consequences: assessors needed to navigate dense data quickly and without ambiguity.

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The constraint

No direct client access throughout the project. All design decisions were mediated through the PM and a close working relationship with the other designer — requiring clear rationale and strong documentation at every stage.

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Budget reality

A tight budget meant no full prototype phase. The response was to invest more heavily in annotation, component documentation, and structured engineer handover — compensating for the absence of interactive prototypes with precision elsewhere.

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Shaping the product through research and pushback

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The strongest contribution I made in the UI phase was challenging the proposed interface for competency score commenting. Rather than flagging a subjective concern, I did quick market research, benchmarked comparable tools, and brought the findings back to the team. The PM presented this to the client. The interface was changed.

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The approach

Evidence-backed pushback rather than opinion — making it easy for the PM to present a clear recommendation to the client rather than an internal disagreement.

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The outcome

The competency commenting interface was redesigned in the UI phase — a late-stage product change driven by design input, not client request.

A design system built to last, not just to ship

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The design system was adapted and expanded from Untitled UI — restructured for a data-heavy B2B workflow tool with WCAG AA compliance and future scalability built in. This is an early-stage product, and the groundwork needed to be right even if the client didn't immediately see the value in it.

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Accessibility

The client's brand colours didn't meet WCAG AA standards for digital use. I adjusted the palette, reconfigured the semantic colour tokens, and relabelled the specific components affected — a systematic fix, not a patch.

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Token architecture

Built with a primitive and semantic token layer separation, meaning additional themes and product expansions can be supported without reworking the system. This took more hours than the budget strictly allowed — a deliberate investment in the engineering team's future velocity.

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Engineer handover

Led a structured handover with regular check-ins, component annotations, and documentation explaining the behaviour and intent behind each element — bridging the gap left by the absence of a prototype phase.