I'm ben Bolton
I am a product designer working in regulated fintech. At IG Group I design for the Pro investor segment of the core trading platform, where execution flows need to be dense enough for professional traders and legible enough for retail investors, inside constraints set by financial regulation. Before that, two years at LiveScore as the only designer in my area, shipping to 56 million monthly users across iOS and Android. There I rebuilt the design system from scratch across 150+ components and lifted engagement on the core match screen by 25% in six months.
I like problems that resist a tidy answer. Most of my work sits inside constraints that are not up for debate, whether that is regulation, legacy user behaviour or engineering reality, and the interesting part is finding the version that still serves the person using it. AI is built into how I work. At IG I set up Claude projects with the UX researchers to keep research output consistent across the team, and I used Higgsfield to create video content for the stakeholder proposal.
a little bit about me
Outside work I ski, travel as much as I can fit in, and follow rugby closely. Two years designing for 56 million sports fans at LiveScore was a great deal easier because I am one of them, and I already knew what people want from a match screen at three o'clock on a Saturday.
I am always curious and I like to challenge myself with new experiences or skills. That is usually what is going on when I pick up an unfamiliar tool halfway through a project, or push further into a problem than the brief asked for.
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 redevelopment where I coordinated seven disciplines. 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 deliberate 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 design for the Pro investor segment, and led the full replatform of the 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 LiveScore, 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. From there I prototype early and cheaply, in Figma or in Lovable when an idea needs to behave like working software, 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
The work I want more of: hard problems, a high bar for craft, and teams where design shapes what gets built. Complex domains suit me, fintech especially.