Benjamin Merrick
I'm a designer, developer, and organizer — currently the UX Design Lead at Tuple Health, after building Nutmeg and Tenacity. I'm here to do good work that does good. You can find me in the usual places:
I'm a designer, developer, and organizer — currently the UX Design Lead at Tuple Health, after building Nutmeg and Tenacity. I'm here to do good work that does good. You can find me in the usual places:
My design process is built on empathy and ethnographic research, followed by deep analysis and rapid prototyping and testing. Each of these projects I shepherded through from the earliest conceptual phase all the way to production, though of course the screenshots are just the tip of the iceberg. I scattered a few sketches about as well to give you a better sense of how I think and work.
Some of my best design work has yet to see the light of day, but I'd be happy to tell you more in person.
Scroll for more projects, for more about each project.
I’m the cofounder, designer, and developer of Tenacity — a responsive web app to help low-income high schoolers and those who support them navigate the complex path to college. See it in action
After an initial research and design phase, we settled on a few principles to guide the design of the core product:
I designed and built the student signup process to be as seamless as possible, while also welcoming the student and getting them fired up to achieve their college dreams. wrote the copy to be encouraging, honest, straightforward, and positive. See it in action
The mentor and administrator dashboards make it easy to help students along their path to college, even if you're not a college expert yourself.
Together with the design team at Nutmeg, I helped design a flow to encourage prospective customers to envision their future and see how investing can help them get there.
This redesign marked a somewhat radical departure from the previous onboarding flow, in that we elected to step through it one decision at a time. This may seem counterintuitive from a UX perspective (won’t more steps in the process decrease conversion?), but had the benefit of greatly reducing the cognitive load at each step.
My greatest contribution was in adapting the complex layouts for all devices (both in design and development).
When Nutmeg leadership decided to launch a lower-cost product with unclear demand, those of us on the design team were initially dismayed. But after extensive research and testing, we found a way to make it blend in seamlessly and naturally with the existing user onboarding journey. Working in a team of three, we began with extensive ethnographic interviews to see how a lower-cost product might fit into our customers’ lives. This research led us to frame the offering as a mere facet of the onboarding process — one simple choice of many — rather than as a distinct product.
With that insight, our next challenge was one of presenting the choice in a way that users would both understand and yet breeze through. We strived to reduce its weight through copy, prototyping myriad combinations and turns of phrase to see how people would react.
As one of the very first providers of a brand new UK government tax-wrapped investment product, we tackled a unique challenge — capturing interest, educating the public, and delighting customers simultaneously.
I was the design lead on the project, covering everything from mobile and desktop UX to marketing site pages and support articles.
One of our challenges was how to help people figure out if the Lifetime ISA was right for them, given that it lacked any prior public understanding. We discovered that a better way to learn the new tax rules would be to simply answer a series of questions about yourself and your situation — and then reveal how, or if, the Lifetime ISA (or one of Nutmeg's other offerings) fit into that.
I designed and built the tool. Try it out
Mifid — a new financial regulatory framework across the UK and EU — presented a tight deadline and a difficult challenge: how to gather very personal details from every customer without frustrating, alarming, or annoying them.
As the design lead on the project, I designed the flow to capture personal details. This project was also the first customer-facing features at Nutmeg built in React, so I designed and developed a suite of components to use as a basis for Nutmeg’s future React-based web UIs, including grids, form elements, and more.
Nutmeg was founded on an ethos of making investing available to all, and our growing customer base reflected that — the old and the young, seasoned investors and complete novices, the tech-addled and the luddite. So how do you help each and every one of them increase their account security and adapt a tech-jargony feature like 2-step verification?
As the design lead for the project, I boiled the process down to its essentials, and, in writing the instructional copy, sought just the right balance between reassurance and approachability.
Until this point, Nutmeg had no way of onboarding customers on mobile devices. The onboarding process itself is long and rather complex in its data input requirements, so the challenge on mobile was to optimize every individual component — from form elements to charts — to create a cohesive and seamless mobile experience.
We started by exploring the onboarding experience as a whole — thoroughly vetting every single input and requirement to wittle it down to as succinct a process as possible. Given a minimaized set of requirements, we designed the process from scratch and iterated and tested extensively.
We started by exploring the onboarding experience as a whole — thoroughly vetting every single input and requirement to wittle it down to as succinct a process as possible. Given a minimized set of requirements, we designed the process from scratch and iterated and tested extensively.
A couple sketches that are emblematic of the way I think and work.
First, a mindmap on thinking through Nutmeg's value proposition from a customer's perspective.
Second, thinking through some information hierarchy frameworks in relation to a navigation redesign exercise.
