Résumé
Steven Wise · Service and user experience designer · steven [at] stevenwise.co.uk · stevenwise.co.uk · linkedin.com/in/stevenwiseux
Expertise
Leadership
- Leading, mentoring and upskilling UX teams
- Senior stakeholder engagement and alignment
- Project scoping, costing and planning
Service design
- Service design from discovery to delivery
- Designing services in complex policy, legislative and regulated environments
- Service mapping and blueprinting, as-is and future state
- Workshop design, facilitation and ideation
Interaction design
- Interaction design with a focus on simplicity and clarity
- Concept creation and prototyping, from paper sketches to coded HTML
- Information architecture, content structuring and enterprise CMS integration
Standards and ways of working
- Discovery and user research: defining and designing to user needs
- Accessibility, inclusive design and assisted digital
- Design systems: creation and adoption
- Government Digital Service (GDS) alignment and assessment
- Embedding agile ways of working and optimising the design to development workflow
- Designing with data: analytics, top task analysis and usability testing
Experience
Senior service designer
Transform / Housing dispute service, HMCTS
September 2025 to present
Returning to the service after leading its 2024 discovery, I’m the service designer in one of two multidisciplinary UCD squads delivering a digital housing dispute service that underpins the implementation of the new Renters’ Rights Act.
- Taking my squad’s parts of the service through private beta: claims for landlords and their legal representatives, tenant responses and court staff case management
- Designed the private landlord make a claim journey and case management for court staff
- Evolved the existing social and council landlord and tenant journeys through private beta
- Working closely with senior judiciary stakeholders to design for judges using a digital housing system for the first time
Senior service designer
eSynergy / HMRC
December 2024 to September 2025
Discovery project to improve team collaboration, governance and onboarding experience.
- Conducted interviews with platform leads, architects and product managers
- Identified key challenges: siloed teams, governance gaps, fragmented tooling
- Synthesised findings into a service map and action-focused report presented to the senior leadership team
- Solutions included: improved onboarding, standardised roadmap planning, dependency tracking, streamlined decision-making and enhanced cross-team collaboration
- Findings informed departmental and team-level strategy
Service design lead
Streamline organisational workflows / University of Southampton
September to November 2024
Led the discovery project to streamline course rollover workflows across multiple teams.
- Facilitated workshops with Admissions, Marketing, Finance and Digital UX to map ‘as-is’ processes, uncovering pain points and dependencies
- Analysed over 180 pain points and opportunities, prioritising actionable solutions in eight key areas with stakeholders
- Delivered insights and artefacts to empower product managers to further develop solutions
Senior service designer
Housing Possession Service / HMCTS
February to September 2024
Led the service design for the Housing Dispute resolution project, reforming housing dispute resolution services in line with the new Renters’ Rights Bill.
- Conducted research through court visits and interviews with judges, court staff, bailiffs and support organisations
- Mapped the ‘as-is’ service end to end, identifying issues and opportunities at every stage
- Synthesised hundreds of insights into maps that grounded change hypotheses for each service stage
- Designed and facilitated three days of ideation workshops with stakeholders to shape the MVP
- Developed end-to-end and Level 2 future state service maps aligned to GDS standards and the emerging legislation
- Prepared a comprehensive handover of findings, artefacts and recommendations for the incoming UCD team
Acting head of user experience design
OneWeb digital transformation programme / University of Southampton
September 2019 to January 2024
Took the university from unfiltered web publishing to user-centred digital products and services that support the university’s strategic objectives.
- Led, trained and mentored the UX design team, one of three discipline teams within the wider digital user experience team
- Established the university’s design system, UX processes and methodologies
- Shaped project goals, planning and prioritisation in partnership with the product manager
- Championed and implemented user-centred design (UCD) and digital inclusion principles and methodologies
- Built relationships with and engaged stakeholders in the UCD process
- Designed end-to-end digital products and services
- Guided the team through the transition from a digital change programme to business as usual
Service and interaction design lead
HMCTS Reform programme / HMCTS (MoJ)
August 2016 to September 2019
The Appeal a Benefit service enabling users to appeal, manage and resolve a benefit appeal online, the first example of judicial online resolution worldwide. Successfully took a suite of products from Discovery through to Public Beta, passing three GDS service assessments.
- Designed the end-to-end service across the submit, track and online resolution products, prototyping in code with the GOV.UK toolkit
- Improved appeal quality and compliance: 99.8% of online appeals compliant, compared with 90% on paper
- Piloted online resolution: 80% of appeals resolved without a hearing, reducing time to decision from a 24 week average to as little as 8
- Designed a progress and status pattern adopted by other government services
- Tested with users in labs, homes and the Digital Accessibility Centre, iterating through bi-weekly sprints
Interaction designer
Security and identity verification / HMRC
October 2015 to August 2016
HMRC needed to make its services more secure but reduce barriers to users accessing those services. The UX team were asked to design low friction account and identification services to support this.
- Designed two-factor authentication and identity verification journeys for services used by more than 9 million taxpayers
- Achieved a 90% registration and 95.5% challenge success rate, refined through daily analytics reviews
- Designed and usability tested a voice identification prototype that gave the team confidence to take it into development
UX design lead
Global web site redesign / HSBC Business Banking
January 2014 to September 2015
The challenge was to increase user engagement and create a consistent experience across 55 markets and 17 languages including the UK and Hong Kong. UX design lead, responsible for ensuring this large scale and complex project was supported by robust UX methodology and high quality deliverables.
- Designed and facilitated requirements workshops with stakeholders from 55 markets
- Audited country site content and defined a new site architecture, validated through usability testing of essential journeys
- Created the modular design system and living style guide, enabling rapid country site rollout
- Mapped content migration and documented integration into the Sitecore enterprise CMS
Senior UX designer
Retail banking application / Barclays Bank
February to December 2013
Multi-platform application enabling the bank and its customers to share, organise and store documents. Integrated into the existing retail banking application to create a seamless user experience.
- Defined the UX process and design principles adopted by the programme
- Designed user journeys, wireframes and detailed interaction documentation for a remote development team
- Reviewed and redesigned the iOS app, with new designs tested and incorporated into the product
Additional projects
eCommerce site optimisation for tablet
Marks and Spencer
September 2012 to January 2013
UX design lead with the objectives to increase conversions and create a more immersive tablet experience for the M&S international site.
eCommerce site and brand launch
EE
July to September 2012
UX design and documentation for modular and responsive eCommerce web site.
KPI optimisation
STA Travel
April to July 2012
UX lead responsible for increasing the travel booking service’s KPIs by optimising key landing pages and booking conversion paths.
Sales tool application
Airbus
March to April 2012
Design concepts and UX documentation for a multi-platform sales tool.
Brand launch site
M&S Bank
February to March 2012
Utilised brand strategy and user research to create designs for the bank launch site. The objectives were to promote the proposition and engage users in the signup process.
Digital agency partner
10:00AM
2002 to 2012
Working directly with brands and providing digital expertise to creative agencies. Clients included BBC, Compass Group, Conran Design, Diageo, GSK, IKEA, KPMG, Reed-Elsevier, Rolls Royce and Tesco.
Design agency partner
Giraffe
1998 to 2001
Set up a design agency with two friends after winning a Prince’s Trust grant. Notable design work included sleeve and promotional artwork for the band Morcheeba and brand, interior and packaging design for the EAT cafe chain.
Extracurricular interests and activities
Design, technology and everything in between. Personal productivity. Photography. Cooking (and eating). Cycling in all its forms.
I recently combined my love of food, cycling and photography in an article and recipe I wrote for the Porky Punk Annual Manual, a book self-published by a culinary community.
My cycling adventures have taken me to many places, from Cardiff to Colwyn Bay, London to John O’Groats and over the Alpine climbs of the Tour de France. You can view my trip photos on Instagram.
