Financial Ombudsman
Redesigning a public service that people only ever use at their most financially vulnerable
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The Problem
The Financial Ombudsman Service exists to help people resolve disputes with financial institutions, placing it at the intersection of legal process, bureaucratic complexity, and genuine human distress. The people who turn to the FOS are rarely doing so from a position of strength. They are often in financial difficulty, dealing with the aftermath of a mis-sold product, an unfair charge, or a claim that has been refused. Many are already exhausted by the time they reach the service.
The experience they encountered when they got there made things worse. The complaints journey was long, opaque, and offered little reassurance that anything was happening. The website made it difficult to understand rights, eligibility, or next steps. The service felt institutional and cold, designed around process rather than people. And behind the scenes, FOS caseworkers were managing their caseloads through tools that were inefficient, fragmented, and slowing down resolution times for the very people who needed help most.
The brief was holistic: improve the end-to-end customer experience, modernise the information architecture, redesign the complaints submission journey, and address the internal tooling that caseworkers depended on every day.
My Role
I oversaw the engagement as Product Design Director, leading a cross-functional team of 6 to 8 across UX research, service design, product design, and content. I was responsible for the overall design strategy and quality of output, stakeholder management with the FOS leadership team, and ensuring that every design decision was grounded in a genuine understanding of the people using the service, particularly those in the most vulnerable circumstances.
The Core Challenge
Designing for people in financial crisis is categorically different from designing for people in a neutral or positive emotional state. When someone arrives at the FOS, they are often frightened, confused, and distrustful of financial institutions, of processes they don't understand, and sometimes of digital services themselves. Many have low financial literacy. Some have low digital literacy. Some are dealing with additional vulnerabilities including mental health challenges, bereavement, and serious illness, that brought them to this point in the first place.
Every design decision we made had to be evaluated not just against usability standards, but against the emotional state of someone at their worst moment. Clarity wasn't just good UX; it was an act of care. Ambiguity wasn't just a friction point; it was something that could cause real harm to someone already at breaking point.
At the same time, we were designing for caseworkers who needed efficiency, precision, and tools that reduced cognitive load across high volumes of complex cases. Serving both user groups well, without compromising either, was the central tension of the entire project.
The Decisions That Mattered
Leading with empathy research before any design work began. Before a single wireframe was produced, we invested heavily in understanding the emotional landscape of FOS users. This meant interviews with people who had been through the complaints process, sessions with caseworkers to understand their daily reality, and a thorough audit of the existing experience from end to end. The research didn't just inform the design; it became the shared language that aligned the FOS team around why the work mattered and what success actually looked like.
Redesigning the information architecture around user mental models, not FOS processes. The existing website was structured around how the FOS was organised internally, logical for the institution but baffling for someone trying to understand whether they were even eligible to complain, and what would happen if they did. We remapped the entire IA around the questions users actually arrived with: Have I got a case? How do I start? What happens next? How long will this take? This shift, from institutional logic to user intent, was the single most impactful structural decision of the project.
Making the complaints journey feel like being heard, not processed. The redesigned submission journey was built around progressive disclosure and clear, human language at every step. Rather than presenting users with a complex form, we broke the process into manageable stages with explicit explanations of why each piece of information was needed, what would happen with it, and what to expect next. Tone of voice was treated as a design material; every label, instruction, and confirmation message was written to reduce anxiety rather than amplify it.
Building caseworker tools that reflected the complexity of real cases. The internal tooling redesign focused on reducing the friction caseworkers experienced when managing multiple cases simultaneously. Improved information hierarchy, clearer case status visibility, and streamlined workflows meant caseworkers could spend less time navigating the system and more time on the work that actually moved cases forward, directly improving resolution times for the people waiting on the other end.
Surfacing process-level problems that design alone couldn't solve, and naming them. During the research phase, it became clear that some of the friction users experienced wasn't purely a product of poor design; it was embedded in the FOS's own internal processes. Certain steps in the complaints journey were slow, opaque, or unnecessarily burdensome not because of how they had been designed digitally, but because of how the underlying process had been constructed. Rather than designing around these issues and leaving them invisible, we documented and surfaced them explicitly as part of our recommendations to the FOS team. This meant the handover wasn't just a set of design files; it included a clear articulation of where process change, not just interface change, was needed to deliver a genuinely better experience for users. Knowing when design is the right tool, and when it isn't, is one of the harder judgements in service design, and one that the FOS team responded to positively.
Embedding accessibility as a non-negotiable from the outset. The FOS user base includes some of the most digitally and physically diverse users of any public-facing service in the UK. WCAG compliance wasn't a checklist item; it was a design principle that governed every component, content decision, and interaction pattern we produced. Accessibility in this context was inseparable from the service's core purpose.
Outcome
The work delivered measurable improvements across three dimensions: reduced time and friction in the complaints submission journey, improved caseworker efficiency through better internal tooling, and full accessibility compliance across all redesigned touchpoints, ensuring the service was genuinely usable by the full breadth of people who needed it.