Transforming
Germany's #1
learning app
for 2M+ users
I led the UX and Product Design team at simpleclub for nearly 3 years, during an exciting chapter of growth and transformation.
Throughout this journey, I focused on maturing the quality of UX and driving innovation, helping simpleclub grow from a K-12 learning platform to a leader in vocational training.
We tackled ambitious goals, while adapting to a shift in user needs and evolving business priorities. With a fast-paced release cycle every two weeks, our work wasn’t just about shipping features, it was about shaping the future of education for millions of users.
simpleclub was known for its colourful, K-12 teen-friendly learning experience. But as we expanded into B2B vocational training, our audience shifted: adult learners, training managers, and enterprise clients, many on desktop.
This required more than a UI refresh. It meant rethinking the user journey, product architecture, and design language across the entire platform.
My mission was to elevate the UX while supporting the company’s aggressive growth goals. That meant combining deep user insight with clear business outcomes.
🧪
Ran targeted user research and A/B tests to validate assumptions, shape features, and prioritise the roadmap based on real insights.
🌈
Redefined the visual language to resonate with a more mature, professional audience while maintaining simpleclub’s vibrant brand identity.
⚡
Optimised the web app to feel lightning-fast and intuitive, refining design patterns and UI components, optimising layout, hierarchy, performance, and usability across all screen sizes.
📊
Impact-focused decisions guided by UX best practices, user research, and iterative testing, ensuring our solutions supported both trainers and learners while driving company objectives.
🦾
Design ops improvements: Introduced UX benchmarking, scorecards, and design processes tailored to a fast-moving, remote-first team. We moved faster at higher-quality, with more confidence.
🧩
Rolled out a scalable design system with design tokens and reusable components, increasing design-dev velocity and improving UI consistency, reducing QA and bugs.
📣
Revamped the marketing site to serve dual audiences with clearer messaging, focused landing pages for B2B & B2C audiences. Conversion-focused UX, driving a 50% lift in lead generation.
Ross has incredible attention-to-detail, team leadership and mentorship skills, and superb taste in visuals and aesthetics. Ross has a very pleasing personality and has been very nice to work with even under high pressure environments. I would jump at an opportunity to work with him again in the future.
🇩🇪
Head of Product at simpleclub
To streamline design consistency and enhance product scalability, I architected a tokenised design system that laid the foundation for a flexible and efficient UI framework. This system incorporated design tokens, naming conventions, and dynamic theming for light and dark modes, ensuring a seamless experience across platforms and devices.
Collaborating closely with design & engineering, I created a robust, reusable set of design tokens covering colour palettes, typography, spacing, and UI components, while ensuring the system was adaptable and future-proof to support ongoing product evolution.
The development teams then built generators to convert my tokens from JSON into Dart for the Flutter team, SCSS for the Angular team, and CSS for the marketing team.
As part of the design system architecture, I created a suite of interactive components to serve as the foundation for a consistent, scalable UI across the product ecosystem. These components were built with adaptability and implementation in mind — enabling teams to move faster with fewer design decisions, while maintaining high standards of usability and accessibility.
All animations for interactive assets and icons were built in Rive, using state machines controlled by UI elements in code. This approach allowed for lightweight, performant animations that responded to user interaction in real time, enhancing feedback and clarity without bloating the product.
From button states and breadcrumbs to form interactions and ratings, each component reflects a unified design language, powered by tokens, underpinned by systems thinking, and tested across real use cases.
Interactive demo → Click around below to explore some of the live components in action.
🔤
Naming conventions: Developed a straightforward, intuitive naming structure for design tokens that improved collaboration between design and engineering, reducing handoff friction and enabling easier maintenance.
🌗
Multi-dimensional theming: Crafted a versatile theming system that accounts for not just light and dark modes, but also allows for context-specific customisation. This includes accounting for user preferences (e.g., system-level theme preferences) and platform-specific needs, ensuring the product delivers a cohesive experience regardless of environment or user choice.
📱
Cross-platform consistency: Designed a flexible architecture that ensures design consistency across our product ranges as well as web, mobile, and desktop platforms, adapting effortlessly to different screen sizes, resolutions, and user interface paradigms, without compromising on the user experience.
📈
Scalability: Built a system that supports future product growth by allowing easy integration of new UI components and design patterns, ensuring scalability while maintaining consistency and flexibility.
⚡
Development efficiency: Centralising design tokens and systematising the design language reduced development time by over 20%, resulting in faster feature rollouts, fewer inconsistencies and UI bugs reported for QA cycle, and improved overall team efficiency.
I led the design and development efforts, creating and refining the landing page through A/B testing and data-driven enhancements.
These strategic improvements resulted in a 50% increase in conversion rates, delivering a surge of high-quality leads. This directly empowered the sales team with qualified leads, directly fuelling the business's growth and creating a seamless connection between design improvements and measurable success.
I can confidently say that he played a pivotal role in our success. Ross completely transformed our website, elevating it from a functional page to a powerful tool for scaling our marketing operations. His work directly contributed to an over 50% increase in conversion rates—a result that speaks volumes about his expertise in UX design and web development.
🇩🇪
Head of Growth at simpleclub
I led design efforts with a clear focus on balancing user needs and business goals. Every decision was guided by UX best practices, user research, and iterative testing, ensuring our solutions supported both trainers and learners while driving company objectives.
Collaborating closely with cross-functional teams, we delivered impactful design solutions that helped simpleclub expand beyond its K-12 foundation into a leader in vocational training.
By leveraging design thinking and product-led growth strategies, I ensured every solution was not only impactful and intuitive but also aligned with simpleclub’s mission to educate the world and revolutionise learning.
🎯
Consistently hit business OKRs on time and within budget, aligning solutions with both user needs and company goals.
📱
Drove feature adoption by enhancing personalisation and optimising user flows, creating more relevant, engaging experiences that boosted retention and usage.
🐎
Streamlined dev handoff and velocity by introducing a tokenised design system, improving team efficiency and quality, and speeding up the release cycles.
♿
Enhanced accessibility with Level A WCAG-compliant components and a roadmap for full AA compliance by 2026.
🪴
Fostered team growth by mentoring a junior designer to an intermediate level in 12 months.
📊
Introduced UX benchmarking and scorecards to evaluate design effectiveness and drive continuous improvement.
⚙️
Improved design processes to iterate quickly in a fast-paced, remote work environment across multiple time zones.
Empowering UK education:
$8 million revenue & award-winning UX.
BACK HOME