Paul Wilshaw

About

Founder of Designed for Humans, a strategic design and product consultancy covering product strategy, UX, design systems, branding, AI and accessibility. Previously led design and product teams at Barclays, Blue Prism and UKFast/ANS. Winner of 80+ industry awards, speaker at Finovate, Product Tank and FinTECH Talents, and host of the Faster Horses podcast.

Focus: Design systems, User experience (UX), Accessibility, Artificial intelligence (AI), Product strategy, Service design, Figma, Design leadership.

Experience

• Founder and Creator, Design Systems for Humans (Present): An AI design system tool that gives UX, engineering and product one collaborative source of truth, so handover stops costing weeks and piling up design and tech debt.
• Founder, Designed for Humans (Present): A strategic design and product consultancy that works as your entire creative department, without the headcount. It brings product strategy, UX, design systems, branding, AI and accessibility together as one service.
• Advisory Board Member, Blake Mill (Present): Bringing product, digital and innovation thinking to a brand built on craftsmanship (and bold shirts).
• Co-Founder, GhostPosts.ai (Jul 2023 – Dec 2025): An AI start-up whose prompt refinement platform helped newcomers to AI write brilliant social posts, with inclusive, accessible writing habits built into the prompts.
• Head of UX Design, ANS Group (formerly UKFast) (Jul 2021 – May 2023): Brought in to unify two brands, two tech stacks and 100+ products after the UKFast and ANS merger.
• Head of UX and UI, Blue Prism (Jan 2019 – May 2021): Joined a listed intelligent automation company that had grown through acquisition, leaving fragmented journeys, several tech stacks and no UX function.
• Head of Creative Technology and Innovation, Barclays UK (Feb 2017 – Jan 2019): Led the function that let the bank test ideas with customers within weeks, before committing to build.
• 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. All 5-star rated.
• 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: An AI design system tool: one source of truth for designers, engineers and product, 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 — Designed for Humans: A Figma plugin for creating consistent icon sets.

Free Figma resources

• The Value Proposition Canvas: Map customer jobs, pains and gains against what your product offers.
• Transparency and feedback roadmap: A public-facing roadmap that shows customers what's coming and what you heard.
• Product lifecycle journey mapping: Map every stage of a product's life, from discovery to retirement.
• A Better Opportunity Canvas: Frame the problem, the people and the outcome before you design.
• Ultimate technology icon set: A technology icon set with usage guidelines and a how-to guide.
• System Usability Score template: Run and score SUS surveys (with UKFast/ANS).
• Alpha, Beta, Early Access and General Access releases: Service design phases for staged releases (with UKFast/ANS).
• Problem exploration workshop: A workshop for exploring a problem before jumping to solutions (with UKFast/ANS).