Ben Bolton.
Product designer.
I design financial products that hold a lot of information and still feel simple to use. Currently at IG Group, on the Pro investor segment of the core trading platform. Before that, two years at LiveScore as the only designer in my area, shipping to 56 million monthly users across iOS and Android. I came to product design from architecture, which is where I learned to work in systems.
latest projects
My Journey
I came to product design from architecture. It is an unusual role and it shapes how I work: I think in systems, I design inside real constraints, and I am comfortable with problems that do not arrive with clean edges.
Background
Four years as an architect at Studio PDP, including a £100m mixed-use redevelopment where I coordinated seven disiplines across a five-year programme. Architecture taught me to design things that hold up across a lot of moving parts, and to work with constraints that are not negotiable. Regulated fintech turned out to be familiar ground.
Education
An MArch from Manchester and a BA from Portsmouth, then a delibreate retrain into product design in 2022. I have kept going since: an AI Product Management certificate in 2025, and a working practice built around AI tooling rather than an interest in it from a distance.
Professional Experience
At IG Group I own design for the Pro investor segment, and led the full replatform of the UK website with no PM assigned, directing 12 stakeholders across marketing, SEO and agency engineering. At LiveScore I was the only designer in my area, working directly with a PM, a PO and the development squad, and rebuilt the design system from scratch across 150+ components. Alongside both, I co-founded Purl AI and took it from concept to investor-ready MVP.
Design Process
I run my own research. At LiveScore that meant 50 interviews and unmoderated studies with 200+ participants, all of it mine rather than handed to me. From there I prototype early and cheaply, get something in front of people before it is finished, and keep going until the detail is right. When the handoff is the weak point I close it myself: I taught myself After Effects to produce production-ready JSON files that went straight into the codebase.
Aspirations
I am looking for senior product design roles where the problems are genuinely difficult, the craft bar is high, and design is treated as a way of deciding what to build rather than a way of decorating it. Complex domains suit me. Fintech especially.