Project Overview

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Role: Executive Director of Design for Data Governance

 

Team: ED (me), 5 x designers/sr designers. Working with 

Objectives: Deliver a platform suite to capture, share, and evidence data lineage and quality across the bank
 

Context

Financial institutions are legally required to evidence how data is stored, moves, and transforms across their systems. To meet this regulatory obligation, the Chief Data Office (CDO) had developed an internal platform that allowed application and information owners to input and configure data lineage and visualise it for governance purposes.
 

However, despite the platform being mandatory for all business units, data quality could be improved. The tool’s complexity, inconsistent language, and lack of automation and prioritisation led to user frustration and disengagement.
 

The CDO team, while strong in data science and engineering, lacked a product mindset and had not applied user-centred design principles to align the tool with its audience’s needs.
 

Challenge

I was brought in as a strategic design leader to troubleshoot the existing solution, uncover the root causes of poor data quality, and build a team to reimagine the platform experience to increase accuracy, adoption, and trust.

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The challenge was twofold:

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1. Reframe the problem from a compliance exercise into a value-driven user experience.

2. Build a design-led partnership with the CDO to embed product thinking and sustainable design practices for future initiatives.
    

Discovery & Insights

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Heuristic Evaluation

My research team began with a rapid heuristic evaluation of the existing platform, identifying critical usability issues:

• Inconsistent navigation and labelling

• Overly technical language that alienated non-data users

• Redundant workflows and unclear pathways

• No visual hierarchy or sense of task prioritization

The tool spoke the language of data scientists, not the business users responsible for entering the data.

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User Research & Persona Workshops

We led a series of persona workshops with key user groups, from application owners to data owners, to understand:

• Who the core and peripheral users were

• Their goals, motivations, and frustrations

• The context and frequency of their data lineage reporting tasks

This collaborative process not only surfaced actionable insights but also brought the CDO team into the user’s world, helping them empathise with their audience.
 

Strategy

We defined a user experience strategy grounded in clarity, efficiency, and inclusivity.

Our approach focused on three pillars:

1. Re-architect the information hierarchy to match user mental models.

2. Humanise the language to make data governance approachable across disciplines.

3. Establish a design system to ensure scalability, consistency, and faster delivery.

This strategy allowed us to move from a compliance-led tool to a governance experience that empowers users to do the right thing, easily and accurately.
 

Redesign & Delivery

1. Information Architecture

We completely redesigned the site’s structure and navigation, introducing global and contextual navigation systems to improve way-finding and task orientation.
 

2. UX Writing

Language was normalised and simplified. We replaced technical jargon with clear, action-oriented language that resonated across diverse user groups, from data scientists to operations managers.
 

3. Visual & Interaction Design

We built a new design system aligned with the CIB brand, establishing scalable UI patterns and interaction principles to deliver a consistent, intuitive experience.
 

4. Delivery & Change Partnership

Through an iterative design and build process, we partnered closely with CDO product and engineering leads to embed user-centred methods into their development rhythm, shifting the team culture from output-focused to outcome-driven.
 

Results

• Delivered full redesign in 4 months (launched October 2025)

• Significant improvement in data completeness and accuracy within 2 months post-launch

• Established the CDO’s first reusable design system for governance products

• Improved cross-functional collaboration between data, engineering, and operations teams

• Positioned the CDO as a leader in data governance usability and adoption
   

Reflection

This project demonstrated how user-centred design can directly improve data integrity and compliance outcomes in a highly regulated environment.
 

As Executive Director of Design, my role extended well beyond design delivery — it was about influencing culture, building trust with data executives, and shaping a vision for design as a strategic enabler of the bank’s governance goals.
 

By reframing a compliance challenge into a design opportunity, we created not just a better tool, but a smarter, more human system for managing the bank’s most critical asset: data.