Product Design Portfolio
Twenty-five years of design — from Flash and print in the early 2000s to UX research, design sprints and shipped products for South Africa's biggest banks and insurers. The same instinct that fills a painting fills a product: keep looking closer until the thing actually works.
01 — Case Studies
Four engagements where the work went all the way through — research, prototype, test, build. The prototypes below are the actual artefacts, not mockups of them.
Digital insurance suite: motor, building, contents & all-risk
Traditional insurance meant paperwork, slow response times and phone calls you had to make in office hours. Activate rebuilt the whole experience around a digital life — shown here in the claims journey prototype.
Claims journey — prototype
Core banking account list & journeys
Research and design on Absa's Customer One programme — rethinking how customers see and move between their accounts. The prototype shows the redesigned account list in motion.
Account list — prototype
The first design sprint — the pyramid prototype
UX and front-end work on FNB's home loans internal systems, built through agile collaboration and rapid prototyping in Drupal, WordPress, Adobe XD and Balsamiq. This clip comes from the very first sprint.
Sprint one — pyramid prototype
UI design & front-end development
Interfaces for Momentum that had to be functional and beautiful at once — including the find-a-financial-adviser experience — built in Angular, CSS3, LESS, SASS and HTML5.
Find an adviser — interface
02 — More Ground
Banking, insurance, fintech, manufacturing, culture. Different rooms, same method.
Lean UX blended with five-day design sprints on South Africa's easiest investment app. Fixed the expired-card flow that was silently blocking deposits, streamlined PIN resets and cash-out expectations.
Outcome: higher engagement, better store ratings, fewer support calls.
Financial systems design for the production line of the new electric Mini in China — complex calculations turned into a tool planners could actually use.
Via CyberPro/Isanqa, 2021.
Liberty Service Console, Welcome Pack and Salesforce journeys; Deloitte's Gratitude App, Toursure and Customer One in Salesforce — research and design at enterprise scale.
Via DVT and direct engagements.
Diagnosed a silent revenue block caused by expired payment cards. One resequenced step made users investable before they invest — and restarted the revenue.
Outcome: measurable revenue recovery from one screen.
Broke months of analysis paralysis with a lean Balsamiq sprint. The first test failed — that was the win. Users tripped on jargon like "third party" long before they reached the clever features.
Outcome: from stuck-for-months to shipped-in-a-month.
UBUNTU and SYNERGY — monumental value murals painted by the teams themselves during a workshop day, now permanent office centrepieces.
03 — The Method
Ethnographic research, collaborative ideation, journey mapping, and prototypes that start rough on purpose. The same process sits behind every case study above.
Watching real users in their own context, not guessing at them from a boardroom.
The whole team, one wall, no rabbit holes. Everything visible at the same time.
The journey before the screens. You can't design a step you haven't found yet.
Build to learn, not to impress. Rough work gets honest answers out of people.
04 — The Long Road
From Flash and print to product design leadership. Nothing skipped, nothing invented.
Full-time UX — research, wireframes, prototypes, Salesforce projects — with sprints and workshops running alongside.
Financial systems for the new electric Mini via CyberPro/Isanqa, and a major assignment with Liberty Life running through 2022.
UX research, design thinking and content strategy put to work on startup growth. Producing more in order to produce better.
UX consultant combining research and design insight — Customer One, Activate, Stash, the Gratitude App and more.
UX and front-end development — home loans internal systems, then Momentum's digital experience in Angular and SASS.
Three years redesigning Yamaha's digital and print presence across Motor, Audio, Marine and Music — plus ten aftermarket brands.
Serengeti Moon, teaching Macromedia, Aspen pharma campaigns (Berocca, Cal-C-Vita), Camelot Spa, Head Count Systems, Agility, Orion Group — design, Flash, code and print.
05 — In Someone Else's Words
“Wouter is a talented UX designer with decades of experience, and he works with a momentum I've rarely seen … often delivering polished work the same day. His insights helped transform what was a fairly dry mobile app into something genuinely friendly and personable.
No one should underestimate the value that someone with Wouter's skill brings to a project. He pairs a calm, professional demeanour with real soul, both in the work itself and in the relationships he builds along the way. Ask him what he gets up to in his spare time; you'll see what I mean.”
Erik
Technical advisor for AI in business · building software since 1985
Client, April 2026
06 — Contact
No pitch decks. No long proposals. Just a conversation about where you're stuck.
wouter@wouterkirstein.com