Paul Wilshaw · Designed for Humans

Designed for Humans

Paul Wilshaw

About

Paul Wilshaw is a UX strategy, design systems and AI consultant based in Manchester, UK. He helps product teams improve their user experience and trains design teams, particularly in using AI tools. He is the founder of Designed for Humans, a design and product consultancy, and the creator of Design Systems for Humans, a design system platform with a Figma plugin and an MCP server for AI coding tools. He previously led design at Barclays, Blue Prism and UKFast/ANS, where he built a UX team from zero to 20+ and a design system of 1,000+ components used across 100+ products. His work has won 80+ industry awards. He co-hosts the Faster Horses podcast.

Focus: Design systems, Design tokens, Figma, User experience (UX), UX strategy, User research, Accessibility, WCAG, Product strategy, Design leadership, UX training, Design team coaching, Artificial intelligence (AI), Model Context Protocol (MCP), Service design.

Experience

  • Founder, Design Systems for Humans (Present): Built a design system platform for product, design and engineering teams, and for the AI tools they now work alongside.
  • Founder, Designed for Humans (2023 – Present): A design and product consultancy for scale-ups, SMEs and enterprises: UX strategy, design systems, team training, product strategy, accessibility, branding and AI adoption.
  • Chief Product and Experience Officer (CPO), Behavioural biometrics AI start-up (confidential) (May 2023 – May 2025): Led product and experience at an AI start-up using phone sensor data to recognise people by how they move.
  • Advisory Board Member, Blake Mill (Present): Bringing product, digital and innovation thinking to a craftsmanship-led shirt maker (and its bold shirts).
  • Co-Founder, GhostPosts.ai (Jul 2023 – Dec 2025): Co-founded an AI start-up whose prompt tool helped people new to AI write social posts, with inclusive and accessible writing built into the prompts.
  • Head of UX Design, ANS Group (formerly UKFast) (Jul 2021 – May 2023): After the UKFast and ANS merger, brought two brands, two tech stacks and 100+ products onto one design system.
  • Head of UX and UI, Blue Prism (Jan 2019 – May 2021): Joined a listed intelligent automation company that had grown by acquisition, with fragmented user journeys, several tech stacks and no UX function.
  • Head of Creative Technology and Innovation, Barclays UK (Feb 2017 – Jan 2019): Ran the team that tested ideas with customers within weeks. Working prototypes came out of two-week sprints, so investment decisions were backed by what customers actually did.
  • Head of Technology and Design, Order with Fork (May 2016 – Nov 2016): Joined a funded food-tech start-up that had an idea but no product, brand or architecture.
  • Lead Creative Consultant, Barclays (Jan 2012 – Jun 2016): Led 12+ designers and developers internationally on Barclays Mobile Banking, Pingit and Barclaycard across iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Mobile Banking and Pingit were both rated five stars in the App Store while I was there.
  • Senior Creative Producer, 2ergo group plc (Aug 2011 – Jan 2012): Designed user journeys, interfaces and HTML5 sites for Pizza Express, Ask, RAC, Phones 4U and HSS.

Apps and Figma plugins

  • Design Systems for Humans: A design system platform that keeps designers, engineers and product working from the same components, with accessibility built in, generated documentation and an MCP server for AI coding tools.
  • Design Systems for Humans for Figma: The Figma app that builds your design system's variables and components for you.
  • Icon Foundry: A Figma plugin for creating consistent icon sets.

Free Figma resources