from 2021
@ Nationwide

Nationwide Building Society is a British mutual financial institution, the seventh largest cooperative financial institution, and the largest building society in the world with over 15 million members. I joined Nationwide in 2021 to lead the design for The Landlord Works product (landlords' portfolio management platform).

In 2023 due to the property market crisis and the company's strategy change, TLW was closed. My team joined the newly created Digital Innovation team to work on digital experiences across different channels, but mostly the mobile app.

Digital Innovation: 2023

The Landlord Works: 2021

When I joined TLW (The Landlord Works), the product team was in the transition from waterfall to agile ways of working and also at the beginning of rebranding. When I started there was only 1 big engineering team and 0 product designers, and now it is 3 fully independent product teams with 3 product designers in each team. My main objectives were:

Change design process to agile ways of working
Hire designers
Establish design system
Introduce product analytics
Mentor product designers
Lead product design delivery

Below you can explore this case study broken down into the following sections:

Table of content

1. Design Process Transformation

The product team was in the process of changing the ways of working. They had 1 big team with more than a dozen engineers, 1 UX designer, 1 UI designer, and a few product managers. The design process was "top-down" i.e. the business sends requirements to the product team, then a UX designer receives a design brief from PM, works on UX, and, when finished, this is transferred to a UI designer. This process was demotivating, not efficient, and long overall. A UI designer was often out of the context of what they were doing and why.

Together with the Head of Product, we changed the structure of product teams. We divided engineers into 2 independent cross-functional teams (later we scaled to 3 teams). I lead the process of growing UI and UX designers to more independent product designers (one per product team). Later we hired 2 more product designers.

The design process transitioned from "top-down" to more horizontal, where each product team and each product designer got more independence. Product designers were more involved in the decision-making process, they were responsible for research, UX, UI, feature delivery, and eventually the success of each solution. At the same time, I created design ceremonies to align design efforts around the same design system, design philosophy, and feedback culture.

We used Figma ecosystem to organize design assets flow. Each product team had its own Releases file that matches Product Sprints. All assets were created using Figma Components according to the newly organized Design System. We also had a Versions Control master file where we stored the Production Design. As a result, design assets flow and the transfer to engineers worked well in the scrum process, it helped a Scrum Master and Product Managers in the overall delivery process.

I also prepared different supporting documentation in Confluence. It helped current team members and newcomers (including new designers) to onboard, to align, to understand the business, product goals, users, and design process.

2. Designer Progression Framework

I also developed a skillset evaluation framework that was based on designer skills in 4 different categories (Design/Research/Communication/Ownership) and was connected to 5 different salary bands (Junior/Middle/Senior/Lead/Head)

3. Design System

When I joined there was no design system and the process of creating design assets was random and incoherent. We invested a lot of our time to create a stable design system in Figma but also to align designers and front-end engineers on the components we use.

We used the Atomic design approach to structure all components

Every component was designed as Figma Component and added to the UI library. An example of a few you can find below.

Figma Components Library

I led Front End engineers to create React Components in Storybook based on Figma UI Library. I prepared all needed documentation on how to work and maintain the design system in Confluence

Storybook Components Library

4. Product Analytics

Here at the company, I pioneered event tracking and video recordings practices. We started to use Hotjar and watch video sessions to study how users interact with UI

I personally have created many dashboards in Mixpanel and laid the foundation for measuring success after each release by tracking different product metrics.

We were tracking:

User Activation
User Engagement
Every Feature Performance
User Retention
User Adoption
and more

I also created and shaped user cohorts and all dashboards in Mixpanel.

In addition to setting Product Analytics I was helping to educate the whole team on how to use behavior analytics, how to create dashboards, how to interpret data, etc.

My vision was to make data available not only for designers but for everyone. So for that reason, I have created a Slack channel, Confluence pages, and kept posting user insights regularly.

Later I also took a leading role in integrating AWS QuickSight (a business intelligence tool), prepared a usable data model with restrictive access to user sensitive data, and created interactive dashboards

5. User Research

Together with user researchers and product managers we were constantly discovering user problems and participating in research activities like user interviews, surveys etc

We also implemented User Testing platform and made both moderated and unmoderated user testing easy and available for all 3 teams.

6. UX/UI Design

My role in UX/UI design varied from project to project but I was involved in all features and most solutions that we released. I was leading the design initiatives, organizing Braintrust and Workshops sessions. Often I was taking an active role in actual UI creation depending on the complexity of the feature.

For example, I redesigned the whole onboarding experience which led to:

CR% from signup to a user who added a property increased x3 times
CR% from signup to a user who linked a bank account increased by 30%

Another example of a project that was initiated by me after a series of user interviews. We found that users were expecting the navigation from property to property instead of navigation between different categories of features (like tenancies, mortgages, finances, etc). This was in contrast to what was common among our competitors.

Although we had a desktop-first design (because 70% of our users were using our product from the desktop) we were always releasing fully responsive designs.

7. User Feedback

Our users were in the center of the design process and the feature development. Not only we were continiously doing user research and were measuring user behaviour to inform better design decisions but also we were prioritising features to facilitate a direct feedback from users on production.

8. Results

For 1.5 years leading design at Nationwide The Landlord Works product I contributed to the following:

Restructured Design Team
Hired 2 more Product Designers
Developed Designer Progression framework
Set up event tracking analytics in Mixpanel and video recordings and heatmaps in Hotjar
Set up data insights infrastructure in AWS QuickSight
Created Design System in Figma
Aligned designers and front-end engineers on Components Library in Storybook
Redesigned the initial product UI
Delivered rebranding with new style guides and new landing pages
Designed a number of new features
Increased user engagement significantly