I'm austra.

Money moving between banks. An AI reading your symptoms. I make the complicated feel easy.

I'm a Product & Design Lead in London. Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, BNP Paribas and UBS use the platform I designed at Edgefolio. At Healthily, I led six cross-functional teams through the modernisation of an AI symptom checker used by 5.5 million people and since certified Class IIa.

At 90POE, I took the payment system from 0 to 1, and it processed $500 million in its first five months. I mentored two junior designers while we built the mobile design system together. On my own team, I onboarded a third, who was promoted after a year. I ran the workshops that aligned eleven designers across eleven squads.

For one of the UK's largest company-formation agents, I decided on a single KYC portal for three account types, with one rulebook compliance could certify. I drew its backend schema and had it live in a month. Registration went from weeks to hours, and support calls fell 71%.

I was the first designer on the UniProt team at the European Bioinformatics Institute. I redesigned uniprot.org, the world's leading protein database, end to end. Four teams worked from the design standards and UX patterns I set, and I presented the work to stakeholders and leadership.

I lead with systems thinking. I own the user research and map the whole operation before I present the direction to the C-suite. Every release passes a design QA gate before it ships. I run the critiques, write the documentation and audit accessibility against WCAG, so the standard holds when I am not in the room.

I'm also an AI manager, and I built this site in Claude Code with my own team of AI agents. I orchestrate their handoffs and set guardrails on what each one can touch. I keep a human in the loop, so nothing ships until I sign off.

The best feedback I never asked for

“You made this? I remember what it was like before. I really needed this. Thank you.”
A stranger at a friend's Christmas party, unaware she was talking to the designer

She meant UniProt's protein cards, which I designed. Half a million people use them every month. With a table, you hunt across columns and hold the pieces in your head. A card shows one protein at a glance.

Writing

I write up what the work teaches me.

Bookshelf

Books I read and go back to

Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
Good Strategy Bad StrategyRichard Rumelt
Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
Thinking in SystemsDonella Meadows
Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke
Thinking in BetsAnnie Duke
Wabi-Sabi by Leonard Koren
Wabi-SabiLeonard Koren