Universities are navigating growing complexity across digital platforms, services and expectations. The University of Exeter set out to strengthen its service-led approach, creating greater clarity, coherence and long-term impact across the student experience.

The challenge was that student experiences were delivered through services that had evolved over time, spanning multiple teams, systems and areas of responsibility. While significant insight and improvement activity already existed, it was difficult to see how services connected end-to-end, where fragmentation was occurring, and where change would create the greatest value.

Over a nine-month engagement, we took an intentionally different starting point. Rather than beginning with individual journeys or isolated priorities, we focused first on making services visible.

Working closely with a small, empowered team across the University, we mapped services end-to-end across the student lifecycle. By combining service mapping with a fragmentation lens, we created a shared understanding of how services connected, where they broke down, and how students experienced the University from front to back.

Journey mapping was then layered on top to bring lived experience into focus, helping teams align around the moments that mattered most to students and the underlying question many were trying to answer:

“How do I get this right?”

The work created more than a set of maps and artefacts. It provided a shared view of operational reality that enabled leaders and teams to see the same services, understand the same challenges, and make more informed decisions about where to focus improvement efforts.

This helped the University develop a common language, identify clear areas of fragmentation, connect existing initiatives, and prioritise opportunities where intervention was most likely to create sustainable impact.

Most importantly, it shifted conversations away from isolated fixes and towards a more joined-up understanding of how services operate, helping create the clarity and alignment needed to support long-term transformation.

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.