From navigation fix to full platform redesign.
End-to-end lead on the platform redesign of Lloyd's of London, the world's largest insurance marketplace and a 330-year-old institution. It began as a navigation fix that tripled homepage effectiveness, and became a full redesign I owned from strategy and discovery through to launch and aftercare. 2.6M+ annual visits.
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SERVICES
UX/UI Product design
Responsive web
Design systems
UX research
Design-to-dev handoff
Team leadership
ORGANISATION
Lloyd's of London
ROLE
Senior UX/UI Design Lead
SCALE
2.6M+ annual visits
A broken menu, and the sprint that fixed it.
The project didn't begin with a redesign. It began with a navigation review. The global nav was a bloated mega-menu that barely worked: clicks and hovers were unresponsive and erratic, and items were given top-of-list priority while receiving as few as two clicks a year, on a site serving 2.6M+. I reviewed how people actually moved through the site, tested the organisation's assumptions, and delivered a focused fix. It worked, and its success is what unlocked everything that followed.
One test mattered most. The organisation assumed two audiences, so I placed an “I want to…” signpost in the hero: one path to learn, one to access resources. If the two-group model were right, people would self-sort. They didn't. They ignored it and used the redesign global navigation instead, the first sign that the two-group model wasn't real, and that navigation was the true lever.
The win earned a full redesign. So I did the deep work.
The navigation fix proved the case and secured a six-figure budget for a full platform redesign. I created the strategy and proposal, then ran a proper discovery phase: I went back over a year of analytics to understand how people really used the platform, and interviewed stakeholders, users, members of the Lloyd's Market and department heads. The strategy came out of that evidence, not ahead of it.
THE KEY INSIGHT
The data didn't say “two audiences.” It said something more useful.
The organisation had read its analytics as two distinct audiences, and assumed a two-lane website. Discovery told a more precise story: the two groups genuinely didn't cross over, journeys were dying at one or two clicks, and nothing encouraged anyone to move between content. The problem was never two audiences needing two lanes. It was a site that never invited anyone to go deeper.
Not two audiences. Three intents, and the movement between them.
The strategy I developed ran on a single idea: people don't arrive as fixed audiences, they arrive with intent, and the same person moves between intents. I created the "intent framework," based on three user intents. It was the basis of designing user journeys and experiences across the website, and later, secure login areas and tools.
Learn
Build understanding through clarity and trust.
Access
Remove friction and build confidence, so people can find tools and get things done.
Evaluate
Empower informed decisions by letting people assess trust and performance.
The three-intent hero selector, the working answer to the failed two-option chooser. Learn, Access, Evaluate as entry points, built to move people between them. The same pattern was designed to repeat across pages and components.
My concept for a narrative-led annual results page, pitched and built as part of the redesign. It's the site's most-visited page every year, and this version holds the record for deepest scroll depth and longest read time. Previously, users hit "download report" and left. This year they read the page end to end before touching the pinned CTA.
A full platform redesign, and I owned every stage.
The navigation fix opened the door. The redesign it unlocked was the whole platform, and I led it from strategy and discovery through to launch and aftercare.
01. Evidence into direction
Turned a year of analytics and interviews into actionable direction, and presented it to stakeholders, making the case with data, not opinion.
Direction, defined and validated
Presented creative directions, ran further research to pressure-test them, and defined the one we took forward.
The full experience, wireframed
Wireframed the experience across the platform and built consistent, repeatable patterns, so it held together page to page.
A design system from scratch
Built the system from the ground up: tokens, components, and full documentation an engineering team could build from without guesswork.
Shipped properly
Prototypes, user stories, acceptance criteria, Jira and QA tickets. I led the design-to-dev handover and managed a business analyst through delivery.
Aftercare
Didn't stop at launch. I iterated on components against post-launch analytics, improving their performance after go-live, where most redesigns hand off and leave.
The design system, built from scratch: tokens, components and documentation the team could build from directly.
Beyond the three intents, two principles shaped the build. Accessibility, bringing the platform to WCAG AA. And structuring content for clarity and reliable retrieval, improving contextual search and filtering so answers held up, and anticipating AI-driven discovery.
A considered pattern for heritage content: an interactive gallery. Have a click.
A mobile-first fix for a filter-heavy site: a bottom sheet. Tap to narrow, tap again to dig deeper.
THE HARD PART
Modern, for something 330 years old.
The constraint was the design problem. How do you make a 330-year-old institution feel contemporary without making it feel unfamiliar to the people who trust it? Fixed heritage brand elements that couldn't move. A conservative user base you can't alienate. Many stakeholders to bring along. 2.6M+ users a year who can't be disrupted. Restraint at that scale is harder than freedom, and it's the whole job.
Impact over two acts.
Two acts, two sets of results. First the navigation fix got people moving. Then the full redesign got them to stay and go deeper.
Act 1: The fix that proved the point.
A focused navigation sprint, and the numbers made the case on their own. These are the results that secured a six-figure budget to redesign the rest.
Act 2: The journeys worth taking.
Measured in a post-launch performance review across six redesigned pages. And because I stayed through aftercare, iterating on components against post-launch data, these numbers kept improving after launch, not just at it.
In their own words
"The most precise and detailed designs and documentation I've ever worked with. It made our whole dev process faster and cleaner, and the designs themselves were something else entirely."
Duncan
Development Lead, Technology partner
