The University of Exeter did not have a shortage of transformation activity. The challenge was that no one had a shared, end-to-end view of the services being changed.

Different teams and initiatives held credible but partial perspectives. Insight existed across research, surveys, service data, reports and the knowledge of experienced colleagues. But it remained distributed across organisational boundaries, making it difficult for leaders to see how services connected, where problems were recurring and where change would create the greatest value.

I was brought in by the Divisional Director of Digital Transformation to help establish a more service-led approach to transformation – grounding change in how students experienced services and the operational reality involved in delivering them. I led four connected discoveries spanning undergraduate, postgraduate taught, postgraduate research and alumni experiences. Together, these made more than 40 services visible across seven phases of the student lifecycle.

But visibility alone was not enough. The discoveries showed that services were being delivered by capable teams, but often without end-to-end ownership across the organisational, system and platform boundaries students had to navigate. Looking across those boundaries made visible the gaps, repeated handoffs and hidden compensating activity that no individual team could see in full.

Three significant peaks of fragmentation emerged. This was an important turning point. Fragmentation stopped being a broad description of organisational complexity and became something we could locate. Leaders and teams could see where different problems shared the same underlying conditions, where isolated improvements would be insufficient and where focused intervention might unlock wider value.

It also exposed a less visible risk: good outcomes could coexist with structural fragility. Services could appear to work because students and staff were absorbing the complexity that their design left unresolved.

As the service-led approach developed, Assessment and Feedback became an opportunity to prove it within a complex service area. Connecting student experience with the academic, administrative and technological realities behind it turned a broad challenge into two defined pilot opportunities: one addressing structural conditions and another focused on experience. Both were developed far enough to give the University practical, evidence-based options for internal consideration and handover.

Postgraduate research required a different response. Evidence from stakeholder interviews and two co-creation workshops created an end-to-end institutional view of the doctoral environment. It surfaced connected questions about visibility, dependency on key individuals, ownership and accountability.

The PGR discovery was designed to establish whether wider transformation was needed, at what scale and where it should begin. The evidence was translated into an institutional case for change, strategic questions and grounded opportunities for action. This gave senior leaders a clearer basis for considering how postgraduate research should be understood, governed and designed as part of wider transformation.

The fourth discovery then made a different analytical move. It stepped across the earlier discoveries to test whether the conditions we had identified were isolated to individual services or recurring across the wider evidence.

The question was no longer simply: What has each discovery found?

It became: What does the organisation now understand that no individual discovery could show on its own?

Working with leaders and teams across the University, we brought the evidence together, tested the fragmentation analysis and shaped the emerging picture into cases for change and strategic questions. This moved the conversation beyond which projects to prioritise, towards what students should be able to rely on, what the University must be able to do consistently, and how ownership, authority and investment should be organised.

AI helped organise and compare material at scale, while careful checking, contextual judgement and testing with colleagues kept the interpretation grounded in the source evidence.

Instead of asking the Transformation Board to respond to another collection of findings, the work located the concentrations of fragmentation, named the conditions behind them and framed choices about where coordinated intervention could have the greatest impact.

This changed the nature of the leadership conversation. The Board could step back from individual initiatives and discuss scope, dependencies, sponsorship, measures and sequencing. It supported taking Connected Onboarding forward while challenging the team to define its boundaries, represent different student cohorts, involve the right academic and professional-services leaders, and combine an end-to-end blueprint with practical early improvements.

The emerging direction connected three horizons of change: improving real service outcomes now, building reusable capabilities that make those outcomes more reliable, and using the learning to shape the University’s future services.

The internal team then carried that direction into action. Using the service evidence, end-to-end thinking and fragmentation approach developed through the discoveries, it continued shaping Connected Onboarding for its next stage.

The progression was tangible:

• more than 40 services became visible across seven student lifecycle phases
• three concentrations of fragmentation and their underlying conditions were identified
• two Assessment and Feedback pilot opportunities were defined for handover
• the postgraduate research discovery produced an institutional case for change and grounded opportunities for leadership consideration
• evidence was translated into choices for the Transformation Board
• Connected Onboarding gained leadership support for further development
• the internal team continued applying the approach independently

The most valuable outcome was not another report. The work gave the University a shared picture of services that had previously been understood in parts. It created greater confidence in the case for service-led change, clearer transformation choices and practical opportunities for action.

Most importantly, the approach did not leave with me. The internal team could use it to continue connecting evidence, operational reality and transformation decisions without remaining dependent on an external consultant.

That is an important measure of successful consultancy: not simply delivering an answer, but leaving an organisation better able to see, decide and act for itself.

The engagement with the Met Office began with a focused challenge: enabling self-service access to data – Weather DataHub – in an environment where service design maturity was low. The immediate priority was to solve a clear, practical problem, while introducing new ways of thinking about services and value.

Following the successful delivery of this initial phase, the scope expanded as confidence and trust grew. Attention shifted from a single self-service capability to understanding how the Met Office’s growing portfolio of products, services, and data could be presented more clearly and coherently. This led to the development of a service-led vision for a digital marketplace, designed to act as a clear front door to Met Office products, services, and solutions.

As confidence and capability developed further, the work progressed into shaping a broader data proposition, grounded in insight into the most significant market shifts facing the Met Office. This enabled teams and leaders to think more strategically about where future value lay, and how services should be structured, accessed, and supported over time.

Brining the unseen into view

The work began by understanding organisational context and mindset, before mapping the existing data and service landscape, much of which had never been seen end-to-end. Making this visible created a foundation for more constructive conversations about complexity, ownership, and priorities.

Customer research then informed clearer user definitions, needs, and journeys, helping teams maintain focus as they adapted to new ways of working during Covid-19 and extended lockdowns. The programme culminated in a shared experience vision, supported by validated UI prototypes and future-state service blueprints. Together, these provided a practical view of how the emerging marketplace should be supported and delivered across people, processes, and systems.

The outcome was not simply a set of design artefacts, but a step change in clarity and confidence. The work directly informed the Met Office’s future-state operating model and business case, helping position the organisation to fully realise the value of its £1.2bn supercomputing investment.

 

Working as Head of Customer Experience for True, I helped take Wealthify, a new online investment service, from pitch to digital award winning user experience.

Wealthify were looking to democratise investing by making it effortless and affordable – so that everyone can access the higher returns that are possible by investing. They wanted to be the:

Easier and smarter way to invest.

We knew from other financial products that faced with complex investment decisions, people find it easier to do nothing. We needed to change this behaviour by embracing complexity and making it effortless. The UX problem to solve became how to:

Do that hard work, to make users feel smart.

Doing the hard work wasn’t just about making complex investing easy. The experience needed to be immediately engaging and empowering. It also needed to be playful in order to motivate users to take the next step. The Create Your Plan page embodies the UX approach. People can quickly and easily make decisions, and see the results. By seeing the effect of their decisions immediately presented to them, users learn as they play.

Although still in its infancy, our differentiating Wealthify user experience is already winning awards against household names like LV and Nationwide. Critically, it is well on its way to achieving its ultimate goal of giving more people the confidence to move from cash savings to investing, which makes their money work harder for them.

The combination of a noble idea, a truly innovative product, and the collaboration of the talented people at True and Wealthify has created a best-in-class customer experience.

 

Awards

UK Digital Experience Awards 2016

Digital CX innovation

Financial Services

Christopher Ward wants to put premium watches within the reach of everyone.

Working directly with the Christopher Ward senior team and customers, I helped take a slow, outdated, and nearing end of life website and replace it with a slick, scalable, and premium online experience combining their idiosyncratic English design with Swiss watchmaking expertise.

From watch ‘newbies’ to aficionados’, the site needs to communicate Christopher Ward’s high quality, no nonsense, in a motivating and reassuring way that makes people feel they’re making a smarter choice.

Being smartly contemporary, confidently different and having an eye for detail were just some of the brand principles, which helped shaping the UX and design of the experience you see today.

Whilst being one of the most challenging integration projects I’ve worked on, it was also one of the most fulfilling from a brand ambition and design point of view.

We’ve just completed the website design of an e-commerce site for Bristol based software development house, Koan. They asked us to work with their talented in-house developers to bring their new brand for Bath & Unwind to life online. We started with their business, which is international, and the goals of the site. We then interrogated the site analytics, before redefining the checkout process; the heart of the site.

We brought before unseen customers to life using personas, which we validated through call centre listening, site analytics, stakeholder interviews and international user testing.

Next we defined the framework of the site, which started as rough sketches, focusing on content and mobile first. It grew to involve a new faceted navigation system to better organise and find the tens of thousands of products on offer.

We then moved quickly into visual design, whilst simultaneously prototyping in the browser to see how it would work on various device screen sizes. We periodically tested the prototype with real users, before finalising the design. We are super excited to see it live!

Asked to redesign the user experience of the Quote & Buy process with a focus on ease of use, reduced drop-out at key points and increased conversion, we started by spending many weeks with Hiscox actuaries to understand every aspect of the current process.

We then tested the process with customers to identify any issues they were having and to see their reactions to competitor quote and buy processes.

Knowing where simplification needed to be applied, we redesigned the process from start to finish and applied best practice form design principles.

By the end we had reduced the number of questions customers were being asked by one third. No mean feat given that, when asked initially, we were told that all questions were essential.

Key project successes:

• Click to quote conversion increased by 10%
• Increased SEO ranking
• Improved click through by introducing landing pages
• Improved PPC marketing
• Quote to sale increase

Working with Cofunds, until recently the UK’s biggest independent financial platform, we created a digital blueprint of the platform, which delivered on their brand promise of Making Investing Easy.’

We first needed Cofunds to understand that this was a marathon, not a sprint. We began with their organisation, as we already knew their products. We performed stakeholder interviews and spent time listening in their call centres – a treasure trove of customer and company insight. We then created personas of their customers, before collaboratively creating the Customer Experience (CX) Strategy:

If the Cofunds platform is . . .
Concise, helpful and puts users in control
We will deliver on the Cofunds brand promise:
‘To Make Investing Easy’

Armed with this  strategy we designed and user tested key elements of the platform, many aspects of which are in used today.