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Hey! Nice to meet you.
What skill does your design team need the most?
Looking for something else?
I'm Zahnia, a Senior UX Design Manager with 8+ years product design experience and 4 years leadership experience
I lead UX teams that fix broken user experiences in high-stakes industries banking, data security, and AI regulatory compliance. Most companies I work with start with low UX maturity and high complexity enterprise products. I work with work with both designers and executives to fix broken experiences, align design with business goals, and ship products that work.
ENTERPRISE DESIGN • UX LEADERSHIP • DATA SECURITY • AI REGULATIONS • DATA PRIVACY • DATA RISK • BANKING • FINTECH
CASE STUDIES
B2B SECURITY TOOLS | DATA SECURITY VISUALIZATIONS
Is your team struggling with ENG led designs? See how I turned a low UX maturity squad into a high-impact team in 6 weeks.
Customer outcome: Helping IT professionals easily identify where their company data was at risk and how to mitigate it.
Business outcome: Got our company acquired
5 minute read
MOBILE DESIGN | FINTECH & BANKING
Transforming a brutal 1.6/5 customer rating to a 4.5/5 mobile banking experience with customer research, rapid prototyping and stakeholder collaboration
Customer outcome: everyday mobile banking on the go more convenient and seamless resulting in 4.5/5 app store rating
Business outcome: Reduction in call volume to customer support, 40% increase in customer engagement.
5 minute read
ENTERPRISE PRODUCT DESIGN | AI & DATA PRIVACY
Does your design team have multiple designers going in different directions? No consistency? See how I unified 2 designs, 2 products into 1 unified AI solution with leadership.
Customer Outcome: Complete privacy and vendor risk assessments faster
Business Outcome: One of the first teams at the company to integrate AI features into legacy enterprise products to resolve customer escalation.
*Limited public view: details available upon request
RECENT LEARNINGS AND REFLECTIONS
I've spent the last 4 years helping scale a design team from team of 4 to team of 30+. Here's what I've learned:
UX with frameworks and systems to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration
By introducing frameworks such as standardized collaboration models, shared design principles, and consistent terminology it established a UX program that brought clarity, alignment, and a common language for the project teams to do effective collaboration.
UX strategic visions helps create alignment at a project level
Crafted a strong design strategy provides designers with a clear focus and north star to ensure that day-to-day implementation decisions ladder up to a cohesive vision. A well-defined strategy translates abstract goals into actionable principles, helping teams prioritize effectively, reduce churn, and stay aligned across disciplines.
Mentoring and goal planning create confident designers
Developed individualized career paths and skill building roadmaps for designers that are supported with weekly mentorship sessions and workshops. This not only strengthened the UX practice but also fostered designer independence and confidence, enabling more effective cross-functional collaboration.
This year, I've been designing for complex B2B AI Regulatory Compliance products and AI features for data privacy products.
Here's what I've learned so far
Research customer's appetite for AI use across a variety of tasks and activities
Each customer will have varying temperaments on how much they want to use AI to help them and how. Different products may have customers more excited or less excited about the use of AI. Do customer research early and often.
Are you solving the right problem? Often times requests for AI features acts as a bandaid to a larger experience problem that could return more value to user and business if we solve that problem first.
True value of UX is to be able to scale design systems and patterns that efficiently solves customer problems while supporting business objectives, something that AI tools cannot recommend yet.
Are we being clear to user how AI is being used? Is it really AI?
Transparency to the user of how and when AI is being used is important in building trust with the customer and ultimately ensure we are adding value for them.
About
Hey, I'm Zahnia!
I'm a Senior UX Design Manager who helps companies turn confusing, hard-to-use banking, data security or AI regulatory products into simple, effective ones that people actually want to use. I work with both designers and executives to fix broken experiences, align designs with business goals, and ship products that work.
Over the last 8 years I've:
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I’ve helped redesign banking apps that took user ratings from 1.9/5 to 4.6/5 stars customer rating
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Worked on designs that got startups acquired
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Helped scale UX teams in enterprise companies who had low UX maturity.
My focus is always the same: make things clearer, faster, and easier for the user and the business. Thanks for stopping by! Let’s get into the work.
*Based out of Toronto, Canada
What colleagues are saying
Companies I've worked with
"Good design is invisible."
Dieter Rams
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