Vijay is a designer, systems-thinker,and team leader. He turns complex problems into products people can actually use.
About
I'm a Lead UCD Consultant across UK Government projects — most recently at FCDO, UK Export Finance, Ofgem, and the Home Office, leading user-centred design on services held to GDS and WCAG standards.
For the past two decades I've designed for some of the UK's most demanding organisations — the Care Quality Commission, HMRC, the Scottish Government, Canon Medical, Nationwide, British Airways and more. The places where getting it wrong has real consequences.
I work across the whole design process — discovery, research, interaction design, design systems, high-fidelity prototypes — and I've led teams and operations that deliver it. AI-first in how I work: Cursor, Claude, and agentic workflows to accelerate and amplify design, while keeping evidence, judgement, and accountability firmly human.
The harder and more regulated the problem, the more I'm interested.
Experience
Two decades designing and leading across government, finance, healthcare and enterprise.
Capabilities
I cover the full user-centred design spectrum — and the operations and leadership that make it ship. AI-first, evidence-led, accountable.
Design craft
- User research
- Service design
- Interaction design
- UX design
- UI design
- Product design
- Prototyping
- Design systems
- Accessibility (WCAG 2.2)
- GDS / GOV.UK Prototyping Kit
Leadership & operations
- Design programme leadership
- Design ops
- Design sprints & workshops
- Mentoring & coaching
- Standards & governance
- Stakeholder alignment
- Team upskilling
AI-first ways of working
- Agentic AI workflows
- Cursor
- Claude / Claude Cowork
- Prompt engineering
- Spec & lean coding
- AI-accelerated research synthesis
- Automated design documentation
- Automated version control
- Agent-driven language translation
What drives me
Engineering roots. Design judgement. Still closing the gap.
I didn't start in design. I have a bachelor's degree in electronics and instrumentation and training in automobile engineering, have a master's degree in computer applications, and began as a software engineer at Nokia, Wipro, Yahoo, and IBM — building things before I designed them. That engineering grounding never left; it's why I'm comfortable in code, in systems, and now in AI tooling that most designers keep at arm's length.
What pulled me toward design was the same thing that keeps me here: the gap between how organisations think a service works and how it actually works for the person on the other end. Closing that gap — especially in public services where the stakes are highest and the users are often the most vulnerable — is the work I care about most.
Two decades in, I'm more curious than ever. AI is rewiring how design gets made, and rather than resist it I've gone deep — embedding agentic workflows into real UCD teams. But the principle hasn't changed: AI carries the weight, the human keeps the judgement.