We elevated customer satisfaction at Momentum by restructuring information architecture, embedding usability testing, and leading a company-wide Material Design migration.

1.

Project
Overview

1.1

Context

  • Momentum is one of South Africa’s largest financial services providers, offering insurance, investments, healthcare, and wellness products through multiple sub-brands.

  • As Product Design Lead, I consulted via Freethinking Business Consultants to help overhaul Momentum’s customer-facing digital platforms during a period of rebranding and architectural transformation.

  • To unify fragmented user journeys across legacy systems, modernise digital touchpoints using Material Design, and evolve design from a cosmetic service into a strategic discipline embedded in cross-functional teams.

1.2

Responsibilities

  • Led a team of 7 designers. During my time, one Senior Designer was promoted to Product Design Lead, and three Mid-Weight Designers were promoted to Senior.

  • Aligned the design system with Google’s Material Design guidelines, rebuilt core customer journeys across web and mobile, and worked closely with the central brand team to balance digital modernisation with Momentum’s established brand heritage.

  • Planned and sized design work alongside engineering to track delivery velocity. This data was later used to support resourcing discussions. Maintained detailed user journeys to align squads and stakeholders across business units.

1.3

Collaboration
& Planning

  • Worked closely with Product Owners, Business Analysts, Engineers, Compliance teams, and Brand Stakeholders. As the digital department gained credibility, it shifted from supporting business unit requests to running discovery work that evaluated shared value across teams.

  • Standardised design tooling in Sketch, and centralised documentation in Confluence. One of our early DesignOps wins was building a structured onboarding area in our knowledge base, improving speed-to-impact for new hires.

  • Participated in agile sprint cycles, quarterly planning, and weekly design critique. Design planning was fully integrated into team rituals, ensuring better cross-functional collaboration.

2.

Challenges
& Constraints

2.1

External Challenges

  • Momentum was formed through a series of mergers, resulting in disjointed systems and customer journeys. Many platforms were built by businesses that were no longer involved in maintaining them.

  • Each business unit was responsible for its own profit and loss, which encouraged siloed digital development and contributed to inconsistent user experiences.

  • Digital experiences were built on legacy stacks with minimal accessibility or UX considerations, resulting in high support needs and customer frustration.

2.2

Internal Challenges

  • When I joined, design was introduced late in the development process and primarily viewed as a layer of visual polish, rather than a strategic input.

  • The digital department operated as a support function, with funding dependent on individual business units. This limited our influence over priorities and timelines.

  • Different teams owned overlapping parts of the customer journey, making alignment across platforms and products time-consuming and politically sensitive.

2.3

Constraints

  • There was no Head of Design in the organisation during my tenure. This limited the team’s ability to influence executive-level conversations until the role was created towards the end of my time there.

  • Agile practices were still gaining traction. While some squads worked in cross-functional sprints, others followed a more traditional waterfall approach.

  • Many legacy platforms lacked documentation and had brittle front-end code, limiting our ability to iterate quickly and forcing design decisions to account for backend constraints.

3.

Strategy
& Process

3.1

Strategic Foundations

  • Collaborated with Engineering on a front-end architecture overhaul based on Google’s Material Design. This gave us the tools to unify styling across platforms and improve accessibility.

  • Built a reusable component library in Sketch, mirrored in the engineering repositories for consistent implementation. Aligned with Material Design as it accelerated delivery and improved visual consistency across sub-brands. Five years after its launch, the system continues to scale and support new products.

  • Worked with Momentum’s central brand team to extend their visual identity into digital environments. Our aim was to honour the brand’s heritage while improving legibility, clarity, and responsiveness.

3.2

Operational Improvements

  • Established a lightweight discovery process to assess business unit requests and prioritise initiatives that delivered shared value. This helped move the department from reactive delivery to strategic prioritisation.

  • Design tasks were sized in story points like engineering tasks, enabling us to demonstrate delivery rates and advocate for increased headcount where needed.

  • Created a structured onboarding area in Confluence, including example journeys, research templates, and best practices in Sketch, ensuring consistency across the team.

3.3

Product & Brand Evolution

  • Redesigned major customer journeys including onboarding, claims, account access, and policy management across life, investment, and health products. These journeys were validated through user testing and built using the design system.

  • Adopted a gradual rollout strategy. We started with high-impact journeys, replacing legacy flows with modern UI modules that could be scaled across products.

  • Extended Material Design’s accessibility foundations with our own usability audits, improving colour contrast, screen reader support, and form validation.

4.

Solution & Implementation

4.1

Customer Experience (CX) Improvements

  • Users encountered the same navigation structures and interaction patterns whether they were on mobile or desktop, improving confidence and reducing confusion.

  • Simplified over-engineered flows such as identity verification and multi-step forms. Used progressive disclosure and inline validation to reduce abandonment.

  • Designed journeys as modular building blocks. This allowed different business units to configure flows to meet their specific needs without fragmenting the design language.

4.2

Employee Experience (EX) & Operational Enhancements

  • Built a detailed onboarding space in Confluence that captured design rituals, journey frameworks, and Sketch guidelines. This helped new team members contribute faster and ensured consistency across work streams.

  • Designers worked alongside engineers in shared planning cycles, using the same sizing methods to estimate and track effort. This alignment improved cross-functional velocity and reduced delivery friction.

  • We introduced repeatable workflows, async documentation, and weekly critique sessions. These rituals strengthened design’s reputation as a consistent and dependable contributor to product delivery.

4.3

Organisational & Cultural Shifts

  • Design transitioned from a cosmetic afterthought to a trusted delivery partner. Towards the end of my tenure, Momentum hired a Head of Design to represent user needs at a senior level.

  • Team members thrived in a supportive and structured environment, with multiple internal promotions validating the investment in mentorship and feedback.

  • Business units began pitching initiatives to the digital department. Design became a key player in assessing feasibility, effort, and user impact by shaping priorities rather than simply executing them.

5.

Outcomes
& Impact

5.1

Business Outcomes

Net Promoter Score

+34

Achieved an NPS of +34 in 2018 (among the highest in South African financial services) and maintained strong scores through 2020, even as the industry declined.

Platform Engagement

70%

Improved metrics across platforms, including increased digital account usage and completion rates for complex forms.

Brand Cohesion

UX

Unified digital touchpoints under a cohesive visual identity, aligning more closely with Momentum’s broader rebrand.

5.2

Efficiency Gains

Better Prioritisation

Delivery

Discovery work helped the digital department evaluate initiatives based on business value and effort, improving resource allocation and delivery timelines.

Credibility through Delivery

Clarified

ROI

Consistent, measurable impact earned the design team the trust of product and engineering stakeholders leading to greater influence over strategic planning.

Reusable Systems

Design System

Eliminated duplication across teams and platforms, speeding up delivery while reducing cognitive load for users.

5.3

Lasting Impact

  • Design became a standard part of early-stage planning, with user-centred thinking influencing product decisions from the outset.

  • The foundations we put in place (design systems, onboarding resources, and planning structures) remained in use after I left the organisation.

  • Design became known not just for aesthetic quality, but for delivering clarity, consistency, and care in how products were made.

6.

Project
Evidence

  • Roadmap to User-Centric Culture

    A cross-functional strategy was rolled out to shift Momentum toward a customer-centric culture. This roadmap embedded UX training, open testing, and design thinking into team rituals across four quarters.

  • Our Approach to User-Centered Design

    The product design lifecycle was formalised into a clear, repeatable process, spanning research, prototyping, user testing, and success measurement. This model aligned cross-functional teams around customer impact.

  • Competitive Benchmarking of Insurance Sites

    An in-depth competitor audit revealed opportunities to differentiate through clarity, emotional resonance, and simplified digital journeys.

  • Legacy Sitemap and IA Audit

    An audit of the pre-2018 site architecture exposed a legacy structure shaped by internal silos rather than customer needs. This analysis was a catalyst for rethinking navigation from the ground up.

  • Usability Testing: Legacy Navigation

    User testing highlighted confusion with product labels and navigation groupings. Observing user behaviour helped reframe IA challenges as strategic priorities.

  • Mapping Use Cases Across Insurance Types

    Workshops with business and design teams mapped user use cases across product lines, aligning customer intent with functional goals across the ecosystem.

  • Physical Card Sorting: Mapping User Needs

    Collaborative card sorting sessions grouped offerings by customer needs—'Protect me,' 'Support my family,' 'Build my future'—rather than internal products.

  • Emotional Triggers & Mental Models

    During whiteboard workshops, we captured customer anxieties and emotional triggers to inform both IA and visual language.

  • Reframing Goals on the Whiteboard

    Early whiteboard sketches explored card labels and interaction patterns to better reflect customer priorities.

  • Portfolio 360 Concept Wall

    We used structured wall mapping and storytelling boards to synthesise product concepts, user tasks, and system content. This was all aligned to customer outcomes.

  • Legacy Interface Snapshot

    The original UI was visually dense and inconsistent. This served as a starting point for modernising patterns, type, and content hierarchy.

  • Traffic Analytics Dashboard

    Analytics revealed mobile underperformance and high bounce rates. These insights guided design decisions and content prioritisation.

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