Twelve years of design, now in AI.

A decade on the enterprise frontline

For about ten years I worked the frontline of enterprise UX, embedded inside four of the largest companies in their sectors. The work came through Plat4mation, EMEA's largest ServiceNow Elite Partner at the time. Custom ServiceNow implementations with bespoke UX and UI for internal users at global scale.

Roche was nearly two years on a pharmaceutical platform for an international user base, with regular travel to Basel for design thinking workshops with healthcare professionals. Philips was about a year, a full discovery-to-design-system cycle. Shell was about a year, complex internal platforms with stakeholder management at enterprise level. ING was earlier and local, April 2017 to September 2018, simplifying complex banking workflows under iterative usability testing.

Earlier independent UX work between 2016 and 2018 included a 25% conversion lift on the UrbanStays booking flow and a 40% efficiency gain on the Planly scheduling tool. The first builds where I learned that design only counts when it moves a number a user cares about.

Leading the design track

Inside the Plat4mation engagements I led the UX track. Discovery, research, prototypes, validation, design-system contributions, and steering the design decisions through engineering handover. On the larger engagements I led a small design team within the cross-functional product team. Pairing junior designers, reviewing their work, defending UX decisions with product and engineering, keeping the design system coherent across multiple workstreams.

Cross-functional was the daily mode. Engineering, product owners, business analysts, legal and compliance stakeholders, in-house IT teams. That instinct is how I think about an AI organisation now.

Why this period still matters

In that decade I watched enterprise design go from a back-office discipline to a frontline one. I learned what tends to work and what tends to fail, not from a book, but from being in the room when it failed. That sense of which way things are about to break is what those years bought me.

For most of that period I heard the same answers come back. That cannot be built. That is too difficult. That costs too much. That takes too long. As a designer those are the answers you push against. The ideas are there, the prototype is on the table, and then a long chain of people grinds it down.

What is different now is that the chain is gone. I can ship an idea myself in days. The wall I spent a decade running into has disappeared, and I can finally build at the speed I was designing at the whole time.

One memory keeps coming back from the Roche period. They flew me from Amsterdam to Basel for a single evening, because it was a Christmas tradition there to walk through the city with the children, and they wanted me to be part of it. I flew in, walked, and flew back the next day. That kind of welcome into a client team is not something you forget. Over those years the work I designed reached many thousands of people. That impact is the thing I am most proud of from that decade.

Why this is the foundation

This case is the foundation underneath everything else. The design-system thinking in Case 05, the flow mapping in Cases 03, 04 and 07, the user-centred approach to AI rollouts, all of that comes from this period.