Tristan Clarkson

Design Operations Lead with a senior UX and Product Design background across enterprise platforms, financial services and AI experiences.

Profile

Design leader with around fourteen years across UX, UI and product design, now working in design operations. My background is hands-on design in regulated services and enterprise platforms with conflicting user groups.

Current work focuses on standards, systems, accessibility, AI guidance, UX quality and the route from design into engineering. I still design and prototype, including coded prototypes where behaviour, timing or assistive technology is what needs to be judged.

Experience

Design Operations Lead

Darwin, part of Marsh

  • Lead standards, review, ways of working and the route from design into engineering across the design practice.
  • Established a suitability route used before an AI feature is designed so the choice of model is assessed and recorded.
  • Defined interaction guidance for uncertainty, escalation, reversibility and thresholds for acting on a person's behalf.
  • Specified accessibility requirements for conversational and generated experiences against WCAG 2.2 AA.
  • Designed reusable AI patterns and states, including citation, caveat and human-handoff behaviour.
  • Use coded and AI-assisted prototypes to test latency, streaming, failure, keyboard and screen-reader behaviour.
  • Support design-system quality, design-to-code parity and defect learning across product and engineering.

Lead UX & UI Designer

Unilink

  • Led UX and UI design for operationally and regulatorily constrained digital products.
  • Designed information architecture and interactions for data-heavy workflows.
  • Used prototypes to test proposals and support implementation with product and engineering teams.
  • Worked with senior stakeholders to balance usability, scalability and commercial constraints.

Lead UI & UX Designer / Web Developer

IN-SYNC Group

  • Designed Luna end to end, including dashboard, Self Assessment, VAT, documents, transactions and advances.
  • Framed the risk that compliant digitisation could exclude customers with lower digital confidence.
  • Structured the product around status and single actions rather than tax literacy.
  • Created the visual identity and UI system, then built the front-end implementation alongside the design.

Previous background

UX freelance, web development, sales and marketing

Capabilities

Design operations

  • Standards and governance
  • Design systems
  • UX quality loops
  • Design-to-engineering workflow
  • Review practice

Product and interaction

  • Complex enterprise UX
  • Information architecture
  • Interaction and motion
  • Service and system mapping
  • Prototyping

AI and accessibility

  • AI suitability and guidance
  • Trust and uncertainty
  • Human escalation
  • WCAG 2.2 AA
  • Keyboard and screen-reader design

Tools and practice

Figma, variables, components and Dev Mode. Figma Make. Hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript for prototypes where behaviour is the question. AI assistance used deliberately for scaffolding, exploration and edge-case testing.

Education

Computer Science (G400)

University of Portsmouth ϩ 2013 to 2017

Contact

North West England, UK

jeremeze@gmail.com