NatWest

I reviewed each journey variant systematically, mapping inconsistencies and flagging components that hadn't kept pace with the new brand direction. In parallel, I worked with designers across other NatWest teams to establish how the new Design System components should translate into our specific journeys — so we weren't making component decisions in isolation once delivery started.

Very quickly, I spotted that the onboarding question set wouldn’t meet FCA or Consumer Duty standards. Working closely with BAs and the Senior Propositions Manager, I mapped regulatory requirements and identified gaps, enabling us to redesign the journey compliantly without compromising the experience.

Consumer Duty introduced a hard requirement: mandatory choice for marketing preferences had to be built into the journey. I flagged early that meeting it badly carried real commercial risk to the acquisition funnel. The goal wasn't to resist compliance; it was to design something that met the regulatory intent without manufacturing drop-offs.

Qualitative research validated the design direction, but the stakes of the change — and its potential funnel impact — meant we needed quantitative data to back it up. I worked with the Senior UX Researcher to define the metrics that mattered most and frame the research around funnel impact, getting the study scoped and signed off. That rigour gave stakeholders the confidence to move forward.

I also delivered Design Thinking coaching to my immediate team throughout, which shifted how they engaged with constraints and moved toward resolutions across the sprint cycle.

The Consumer Duty marketing preferences screen was the centrepiece — designed to go through both qualitative and quantitative research before anything went near Dev. Getting there required more than design work.

A parallel workstream had begun designing the same experience independently, with their Dev team flagging the proposed change as too technically complex to implement. I wasn't convinced. I sat down directly with one of our Developers to map the complexity properly — what the change actually required, what the real implementation impact was, and where the perceived risk was being overstated. That conversation gave us the evidence we needed. I escalated to stakeholders, got the right people on a call, and we came out of it with sign-off to proceed with the research-validated approach.

Having identified information architecture issues in the initial designs, I explored several directions for the redesigned experience and presented the options to stakeholders before committing to a test-ready version. Getting alignment at that stage meant the research wasn't validating assumptions — it was testing a considered, stakeholder-backed design.

The prototype itself required building every user choice outcome manually. Anonymising the branding for testing meant no shortcuts through the tooling, so I designed the full pattern by hand to hit the research deadline — every state, every path, production-ready.

I partnered with both the internal Senior UX Researcher and an external research outfit to execute the user testing, and co-authored the research findings document with the internal researcher. With the qualitative direction confirmed, I then led the approach to a quantitative study aimed at generating funnel impact metrics on the redesign — producing two prototype variants, one branded and one unbranded, to isolate whether the NatWest brand context was influencing behaviour independently of the design. That distinction mattered for how we interpreted the data.

Running qual and quant in sequence — each informing the other — turned a compliance deliverable into a proper evidence base. The redesigned marketing preferences screen is now live in the NatWest mobile app.