CSC was undergoing a full digital transformation, redesigning every member-facing product end to end. The organisation had decided to build a UX function for the first time. I was brought in to lead that establishment while delivering product outcomes across multiple squads simultaneously.

That meant operating at two altitudes: shipping product improvements with hard outcome targets, while building the infrastructure, standards, and organisational credibility that would make UX a strategic function rather than an execution service.

Qualitative interviews with members aged 45–65 across PSS and MSBS schemes, combined with quantitative behavioural analysis of existing tool usage. This research programme underpins both case files from this engagement — see Retirement Calculator Redesign for how it shaped that product directly.

research artefacts

From a balance to a retirement plan

The Retirement Income Strategy experience connects household circumstances with income priorities. Members can filter profiles by living situation and relationship status, compare flexible access with income stability, and move into modelling a strategy.

Original design — profile selection

RIS modeller rating of 4.1/5, design system adoption across 12 squads, and a reported 30% improvement in development velocity.

Original design — retirement planning

The strongest decision was the earliest: investigating the reasons for member confusion before choosing an interface response. What I would do differently: include members who had already transitioned into retirement in the research cohort. That group would have validated whether outputs mapped to real-world outcomes, not just usability satisfaction scores.

CSC's retirement planning tools were built for financial experts in a domain where expertise is rare. Most members only engage seriously with their super at the point of retirement transition, often for the first time, with no framework for the decisions they needed to make.

Behavioural research from the same programme — full detail in Building UX at CSC — surfaced four patterns that directly shaped the decisions below.

The legacy interface and a later concept reconstruction illustrate the change in information hierarchy. The concept screens below explain the design approach; they are not original CSC production screenshots.

Before — legacy full-pension breakdown

Concept reconstruction — benefit options

Concept reconstruction — guided flow

Reported project outcomes: calculator errors reduced 60% and task completion improved 45%.

Teams across marketing, product, and content were waiting weeks for participant recruitment before they could test ideas. Teams facing launch deadlines shipped without testing. Assumptions went unvalidated. When research did happen, it was often too late to change the direction it surfaced.

Conducted 60+ real participant interviews across six distinct student cohorts before building anything. Each cohort mapped across pathway logic, content needs, support requirements, and decision triggers. This data became the foundation the synthetic personas were built from. Not a set of assumptions, but a structured distillation of real interview evidence.

interview and research process

The pipeline runs in four stages: structured interviews in, transcript and behavioural-pattern analysis, a synthesised persona with sourced traits, and a queryable persona teams can interrogate before running real-user testing. The screens below are concept exploration built to pressure-test that pipeline end to end — not screenshots of the shipped Flinders tool, which runs on simpler internal tooling without a polished front end.

Concept exploration — pipeline mechanics

Concept exploration — synthesis & interrogation

Adopted as the institutional research framework across the CX team. Teams now pressure-test concepts without waiting for participant recruitment, with a reported 2–4 week reduction in the early-stage research cycle.

The responsible usage guidelines are in active use, treating synthetic personas as hypothesis generators that require real-user validation before high-stakes decisions ship.

The most important thing I built was not the platform. It was the responsible usage framework. AI-generated personas are easy to over-trust, especially in organisations where research capacity is thin. What I would do next: build a validation loop into the platform itself, so teams are prompted to schedule real-user testing when a concept moves past the hypothesis stage.

Help new users see the value sooner

The original mitimes v4 brief focused on complex navigation, unclear instructions, and advanced features that new users struggled to discover. The work combined interviews and ethnographic research with an interface and content audit, onboarding improvements, and a consistent component system.

mitimes is a legal time-capture and billing platform built to solve a specific problem: lawyers don't like logging time, and every uncaptured phone call or email is revenue a firm never bills. Instead of asking lawyers to manually enter every unit, mitimes listens for chargeable activity — calls, emails — and surfaces it as a confidence-sorted feed for a lawyer to confirm, edit, or dismiss in seconds.

brand & product

I designed the interface and interaction model across desktop, mobile, and an Outlook plugin, all built around the same idea: reduce time capture to a review, not an entry task.

the review feed

mobile companion

Earlier in the process, exploration ran across the client-facing "action required" list, an Outlook logging flow, a phone-alert prompt, an IT/owner setup dashboard, and an icon language built to read at a glance inside a dense timesheet.

exploration & system

The interesting design problem here wasn't the timesheet — it was the review queue. Automatic detection is only useful if a lawyer trusts it enough to act on it in one swipe rather than double-checking every entry, so confidence had to be visible, not just accurate. That's a lens I carried directly into the CSC retirement calculator work years later: show the reasoning, not just the number.

Brave Energy Systems operated across three distinct sub-brands within the energy sector, each with its own audience and market position but no shared visual or structural system tying them back to the parent company.

I led the master brand architecture, defining how the parent brand and its three sub-brands related to one another, then built a full design system to keep that structure consistent as each sub-brand shipped its own materials.

A shared identity with room for distinction

The original brief identified two connected problems: the master brand was not cohesive, and the sub-brands were not clearly differentiated. Stakeholders needed clearer communication of Brave’s values and the solutions each brand offered.

This was my clearest early lesson in designing systems rather than screens — the constraint wasn't any single sub-brand's identity, it was keeping three identities legible as parts of one company without flattening what made each distinct.

Ruby Australia needed a community platform that could serve a technical, opinionated audience — event listings, resources, and community identity — without the generic feel of an off-the-shelf community template.

I worked on the platform's information architecture, developed the brand language, and built the design system that held the two together as the platform grew.

research & insights

approach & responsibilities

Designing for a technical community meant the audience could see straight through anything that felt templated. Earning credibility with IA and content decisions, not just visual polish, was the real brief.

Most style guides at the time were static documents that drifted out of date the moment a component changed. Dash of Style was built as a living style guide tool: a design system reference that stayed synced to the components it documented.

I designed and helped build the tool as open source, aimed at design teams who needed a shared source of truth between design and engineering without maintaining a separate static document.

research & insights

approach & responsibilities

Seeing it adopted by teams I'd never spoken to was an early lesson in building infrastructure that outlasts the project — the same principle behind the design system work I later led at CSC.

I'm Valentine Ogbeide, based in Adelaide, Australia. I don't really separate research from product strategy — never have. Research without a product direction is a nice PDF nobody acts on. Product direction without research is a guess wearing a confident outfit.

Most of my career has landed in places where getting it wrong has a real cost to a real person — a retiree, a first-in-family student, a lawyer's client. That's shaped how I work more than any methodology has: I've built UX functions from scratch, shipped inside regulated frameworks that don't forgive sloppiness, and designed AI tools that put research capability in the hands of teams who'd never had it before.