Vanguard
Somo
Design Director
Design direction
Workshops
Prototyping
User testing
I was apointed as design lead to work alongside Vanguard's mainly inhouse digital team and Head of Client Experience. I accelerated the design approach and championed in a new design system I called Nebula. Crafting it with a small team, this was to help with the design and development of Vanguard's European market websites. We introduced modern tools and processes and I coached Vanguard teams to be more effective in product thinking and agile delivery, overcoming organisational obstacles to the launch of high quality digital products at pace and scale.
Vanguard's European market websites needed a step change in both design and technical performance, with an ambitious launch schedule of 10 sites in one year across B2B and also B2C areas.
We scaled a cross-functional agile team working in close collaboration with Vanguard business and IT, with myself as Head of Design within their London office.
We introduced modern practices needed to drive pace, quality and consistency. The first being a brand new design system I coined as Nebula. While they had a strong brand coming out of Australia, and the American market was well established, I felt the EMEA market needed to stand on its own and posess agency of its products and solutions.
This highlighted the USA design system not meeting AA compliance and also being in a very disfunctional state which led to spearheading EMEA's breaking of the mould. By empowering teams through design leadership and insight we got to work creating a truly well documented and thought out design system, meeting accessbility standards as well as brand values.
With this in place we used the B2B market as a tester, before moving into the B2C space. Educating product owners about the speed of testing and delivery we now have with this in place.
Of course with it being built from the ground up, they had also had better technical architecture on top of the new evidence based product leadership - bringing the focus needed to release quality sites every month, while coaching Vanguard in digital skills.
While the EMEA region were rolling out the DS into products, I also used it to showcase the USA concepts for their Internal tools. Again highlighting the out of date nature the USA design system was in, and why other areas of the world need to be independent and not rely on red tape and process to update anything.
