james earnshaw

▍ experience design leader · 20+ years · banking, telco, super & insurance

I design for
the hard parts.

Regulated, legacy and high-stakes services, where people need to trust the answer. Across two decades, I’ve turned messy business goals into products and services people genuinely value. No jargon — just clear thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and outcomes that stick.

// what I believe

and where it came from
  1. 01

    Find the real problem before the brief

    Tax reporting looked like a document problem. It was a trust problem across data, operations and the reports themselves. Redesigning the PDF first would have made an unreliable number easier to read.

    proof ▸ DASH tax reporting →
  2. 02

    Put friction where people need to think

    Pre-filled expenses let customers wave through wrong figures. Showing the scraped amount as a starting point, not an answer, made one step slower and the whole application more likely to be approved.

    proof ▸ ubank home lending →
  3. 03

    Foundations are insurance

    A top-down pivot didn’t land. Loan Assist shipped anyway, because the shared design system meant the banker’s view and the customer’s screens were already built from the same parts.

    proof ▸ Loan Assist →
  4. 04

    AI gets me to the expert conversation faster

    I started out knowing nothing about responsible lending law. AI-assisted research meant I could take legal and risk the exact clauses that applied, instead of a design and a question, and get to yes.

    proof ▸ ubank home lending →

// where next