About

I didn't start in design. My first career was in recruitment.

For several years I watched how organisations actually make decisions: who gets heard, who gets overlooked, and how trust is built in rooms where authority isn't evenly distributed. At the time it felt like business experience. Looking back, it was an early education in systems and human behaviour.

I moved into UX in 2017. What drew me in was simple: the belief that products should make sense to the people using them.

I spent over four years at Paddy Power Betfair (now Flutter Entertainment), working on large-scale products in complex, regulated environments. It is where I learned how constraints shape decisions, and why systems thinking becomes essential when the stakes are high.

From there I joined JD Sports as Senior Product Designer. Nearly four years working on the platform systems underneath a large-scale consumer e-commerce product: authentication, navigation, payment integrations, localisation across multiple markets. Rarely the most visible parts of a product. Often the parts that determine whether the experience feels coherent or falls apart.

I work with engineers, product managers, payment partners, brand specialists, and operations teams. Different priorities are inevitable. Alignment is not. Good design work often comes from helping those perspectives converge around a shared understanding of the problem, before anyone opens a design tool.

I bring service design methods into how I approach problems: journey mapping, blueprinting, cross-channel thinking. Particularly useful when complexity lives in the seams between touchpoints rather than within a single interface.

Over time I formalised this into a repeatable framework, built from scratch and introduced to the team at JD Sports. Ten designers worked to it across every major project. It covers kickoff, research, UX, UI, testing, and handoff, with accessibility threaded throughout rather than bolted on at the end.

I also changed how work came into the team. The Jira intake template included a field called ‘Solution’ — a space where stakeholders described what they wanted built before design had been involved. I replaced it with fields requiring problem framing, user context, and business rationale. A small operational change with a meaningful signal: design enters at the problem, not the solution.

When JD Sports’ Head of Design left at the end of 2024, I took on informal leadership of the four-person team for five months. The role was unofficial but substantive: running stand-ups, owning prioritisation across the team, presenting directly to senior stakeholders.

The harder part was the team dynamic. Two designers had both applied for a senior role that had been filled before the manager left. They arrived into that period feeling overlooked. I held direct conversations when it was necessary, ran weekly one-to-ones, and was honest about what I could and couldn’t advocate for without a manager in place. The team delivered through it. Projects moved. Stakeholder confidence held.

Alongside delivery, I have mentored designers at multiple points in my career, focusing on developing their thinking rather than their output — specifically how to operate upstream, frame problems before proposing solutions, and build credibility with non-design stakeholders. Three designers I mentored at JD Sports have since referenced that work directly in LinkedIn recommendations.

I have also been building AI into how I work: using it to synthesise research, stress-test assumptions, and surface complexity earlier in the process. I wrote a short book on this approach, and I have started bringing shared prompt frameworks into how teams work, not just individuals.

Becoming a dad in 2025 sharpened something I already believed: the most meaningful work outlasts the release cycle. That applies to the products we build, the systems we leave behind, and the designers we help along the way.

I write occasionally at richardilott.com/thoughts about design, decision-making, and the work behind the work.