Hello, Barclays. I'm Josh.
I'm a design lead for J.P. Morgan Private Bank, working just over the river from your campus in Glasgow.
I have a wealth of experience that I believe would be very helpful for this Design Lead role in your team at Barclays.
Over the past few years I've worked on impactful work that I am proud of, but I am unfortunately not able to show most of it externally. I'd love to be able to talk through it though.
For this folio I am going to share what I can about my recent work, to give you a taste of my skills and experience. I've also included some older work too.
Leading design at J.P. Morgan Private Bank
Designing client-facing experiences
For the past three and a half years I have been working for the International Private Bank on client-facing products.
I've lead end-to-end design as an individual contributor for a variety of projects, including:
- Authentication
- Messaging
- Onboarding
- Navigation (*this is my current project)
I was involved in all of these from an early discovery phase with research, prototyping and testing right through to being involved in delivery with partners in tech.
I can't access the latest version of these products outside of work, but below is a video to show products I have designed for.
The design of almost everything in this video has since been updated, for example it all now uses a new design system that I helped create.
While I've been at J.P. Morgan we've won awards such as "Best Digital Private Bank" and "Best Private Bank for Digital Customer Experience".
I've also worked closely with teams who work on internal products used by bankers and advisors who serve our clients.
Global lead for the Private Bank design system
I have established and led the work on the client-facing design system for the Private Bank.
This has improved the quality and consistency of our products significantly, as well as helping us deliver them much more efficiently. It has enabled designers to deliver work that is far better than what was possible when I first joined.
This was, and continues to be, a huge piece of work and is the thing I am most proud of in my time at J.P. Morgan. It required a lot of stakeholder management and advocacy, working very closely with our developers.
Improved visual design
Here you can see some examples of the new visual design in our updated mobile App. You can see further screenshots on the App store.
Accessibility
I am responsible for leading accessibility for our team. This has been a big focus over the past year as we have worked to ensure we are compliant for the upcoming European Accessibility Act.
I have implemented processes and governance to ensure all design work is handed over with accessibility properly considered. I've also needed to collaborate with stakeholders across the business, from product, tech, legal risk and compliance as well as engaging external partners.
This has required a good knowledge of accessibility and front-end technologies, but the most challenging aspect has been managing all the different stakeholders.
Design leadership
I have direct reports in London and Hong Kong, and work with partners across many different countries from Texas and New York to Singapore and London.
I have really enjoyed coaching and managing my directs, who have delivered really important work such as online trading.
Other fun things I've done here
Hosted events for the design community
I've been an active part of the office in Glasgow, and have organised large meetups for all the designers in the office across different lines of business.
A highlight has been organising Config watch parties for Figma's conference the past few years. We've had great attendance for these from non-designers too.
Created design principles
I created a set of "design principles" for our Private Bank design team to be used as tools help us make decisions. These were helpful in advocating for good design with stakeholders. I presented these at a Global Private Bank town hall.
Part of a "content advocates" initiative
I've been taking training courses on Content Design and making use of it within my work. I have been the "Advocate" representing our client-facing team.
Taking part in hackathons
For the past two years I've been involved in the global hackathon at JPMC, working in teams with folk from different functions and lines of business.
This last year our team came fourth with a concept for an LLM powered news aggregator which we built a working prototype of in a day.
Senior designer at Tesco Bank
The users I focussed on at Tesco were quite different from Private Bank customers. In fact the products I spent most of my time on were aimed at low-affluent families.
But the design process was just the same, and I loved designing products for millions of customers.
Clubcard Pay+
Clubcard Pay+ was a new proposition from Tesco Bank in collaboration with the Clubcard team at Tesco.
It is a Clubcard tied to a Bank account so customers could ring-fence their shopping money to help them with budgeting, and get rewarded for doing so. It was started following insights from a big piece of ethnographic research that looked at spending and budgeting habits of lower affluent Tesco shoppers.
I was involved in the design of the mobile app, but also in developing the proposition as a whole and coming up with new ideas. I helped run design sprints and workshops on it.
Throughout the process we did lots of moderated and unmoderated research and usability testing.
I don't have access to all my work from Tesco Bank, but below is a concept prototype I made to explore an onboarding flow from within the Tesco groceries app. This was used to present to senior leadership.
I was involved in the team on Clubcard Pay+ from early in the process, throughout the Beta and then public launch. I continued to be involved as we worked on improving the experience.
Encouraging users to save more
With the success of Clubcard Pay+ for the bank, we were tasked with working on other propositions to go alongside it.
A big part of Clubcard Pay+ was the Round Up savings accounts that came with it. This was very similar to the feature Monzo had recently launched but we were working on some Tesco twists.
The goal here was to help kickstart saving for our target customers, who told us they struggled to do so.
I was involved from the start in discovery research, concept generation, and testing with customers
Some of the concepts we came up with:
- Big Shop, Big Round Up was a feature I came up with and developed, that is now live with Clubcard Pay+. The idea being that for "big shops" (a concept our customers were used to) you wouldn't round up to small change but to a £5 note, saving you even more money.
- Saving streaks was another idea, where you'd be rewarded for not dipping into your savings over time. THe longer you could go without withdrawing the more rewards you'd get.
- Smash the pot was an idea based on "Terramundi" money pots that you have to smash to open. It was similar to the saving streak idea, but used a nice interaction and animation to get you to "break the pot" before you withdrew any money. There were rewards you would lose if you broke the pot. (I had great prototypes for this with really nice interaction and motion design but annoyingly don't have access to any of them!)
- Visualise your savings (in Tesco ways!). This was a concept to help you frame your savings differently so you viewed small amounts more positively at first. It was using popular items from Tesco, which helped bring some colour and brand in from Tesco. I do have an old prototype for this one:
Design research and "Customer Wednesdays"
I was one of a small group of research leads who co-ordinated and ran research. We hosted training with Nile so that the whole team could build up design research skills.
I facilitated moderated and unmoderated user research, as well as quantitative studies, to find insights that we could apply to our work.
One of the best initiatives we ran was Customer Wednesdays. Every Wednesday we'd invite 5 real customers in for some research.
It has a few purposes:
- Learn more about our customers.
- Give designers opportunities to hone research skills.
- Encourage good design research across the bank.
It was very succesful in getting stakeholders right up to the CEO interested in design and thinking about our users.
Fostering remote collaboration during Covid
When we started working from home I adapted the format and ran the first remote Customer Wednesdays, using user testing to host moderated interviews. We learned from that and I went on to facilitate much more remote research.
An upside of this is it allowed us to conduct research with customers from all over the UK for the first time. The patterns I helped start with this continued even when we could return to the office.
Beyond research I was a big proponent of remote collaboration, using Miro and hosting remote workshops. I ran remote design sprints and even created a spin-off format of "Design Relays" where Tesco Bank would run a sprint, before passing it to design colleagues at Tesco who could then pass it back.
Fearsome
Before I designed software I trained and worked as a Product Designer making physical products.
Fearsome are a product design agency based in Glasgow who work for clients across the world.
There I worked on a huge variety of client projects, such as medical products, baby furniture, construction, PPE, the circular economy and more. I was involved in research, design, prototyping, and presenting to clients and pitching to prospects.
I was involved in ethnographic research. For example when developing new PPE for the construction industry I spent a lot of time on building sites observing the workflows of construction workers.
I ran a number of design sprints to lead the development our own product concept, a tool to support people with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis.
I invited clinicians and experts from the British Lung Foudnation and Oxygen therapy suppliers into our studio. I met with consultants and patients to understand their needs. This project was entered to an open brief created by a charity and we also applied for grants to fund this.
The best cup of tea in the world
This was my final year project at art school / university. I was aiming to meet the same desire that led to the popularity of "teasmades" in the 60s and 70s but with better design. Coffee machines are everywhere but not tea, and this was an attempt to create sometning in that area.
This project won the IMechE Best Project award, and my final prototype was purchased by GSA and is in their collection.