William Blake
Senior Product Designer (UX) · London, working remotely
The person who designs every LUXD Local site. How we operate.
I work on the systems that carry consequences. Four years at IBM sat at the intersection of service design, product design and product management: training Watson products, building conversational apps for npower and Sky, and consulting across FinTech, automotive, telecoms and data visualisation for clients including Lloyds Banking Group, RBS, Barclaycard and EY.
That widened into B2B SaaS platform work at Faculty and GfK, growth and compliance work at Vodafone, and DeFi compliance at Radix. Since October 2025 I've also run LUXD (incorporated as LUXD LTD in September 2026), my own design and AI studio.
Practice areas
IBM training completed
Education
Entrepreneurship, computer science, product management, and human computer interaction and design. Final project: a user centred platform for media company SonarTV.
Approach
How the work gets done.
Ownership before interface
Most hard UI problems are ownership problems wearing a UI costume. Who is accountable for this record, who is allowed to change it, and what happens when it fails. Answer that and the screen usually designs itself.
One version of the truth
Customer facing products and the back office systems behind them tend to disagree. I design for a single shared account of state across both, because two versions of the truth is where the support cost lives.
Compliance as material
Regulatory limits, AML tiers and safer gambling constraints are not checkboxes applied after the fact. Surfaced early they are planning information. Surfaced late they are failure states.
Build it, do not describe it
Working prototypes beat annotated wireframes in every stakeholder room I have been in. I build the real thing early, in code where it helps, so decisions are made against something people can use.
Handoff is the deliverable
A Figma link is not a specification. Token tables, component inventories and written build specs let engineering rebuild the work in any stack without making design decisions on the way.
AI used openly
Gemini for market and desk research, Claude for spec writing and rapid artifact generation. Every case study states plainly which decisions are mine and which output was machine assisted.
Additional IBM engagements
Shorter projects from four years of internal and client consulting, 2016–2019.
Lead user researcher for the colleague workstream on a lab engaging wealth customers earning over £250k. Interviewed 26 bank managers, private banking advisors and telephony finance consultants; produced 4 concept prototypes for senior executives.
Watson-based Agent Assist app for mortgage call-centre response times. Client signed onto a second phase on the strength of the results.
International currency trading and payment transfer app. 92% client satisfaction score for 2017 against RBS's own deliverables.
Front end for a data-modelling product using D3 to visualise flavour connections. Client extended IBM's use to a wider portfolio of projects.
Feedback
Unedited, attributed, and from the people who were in the room.
“Will eventually delivered thirty seven screens, all clean, stylish and consistent with Ford's existing app library.”
“You have done an outstanding job of turning this around in a very short timescale.”
“Some high value projects have been transformed from heading for failure to being resounding successes.”
“Without their help the project would not have met the deadline.”
“Had it not been for the custom dashboard, I am certain we would not have sold the second phase.”
“A great example of UX leading the three connected legs of scope.”
“I was really impressed by William's agility and fearless can-do attitude.”
Clients & accounts
28 organisations across 7 sectors. Filter by domain.
Selected client and employer accounts across 7 sectors (2016 to present).
