Michael Featherby
UX Design Manager
A UX Design Manager with over 20 years experience, delivering user-centred, commercial driven experiences for leading global brands.
Brands I’ve worked with.
Case Studies
Next UK, International, Credit Services and Partners
It’s hard to know where to start, having worked on so many projects across all aspects of NEXT UK and International, I’ve had the privilege of shaping, optimising and even completely overhauling our experiences. Here’s a few hand-picked initiatives I’ve led.
Platform Modernisation
Re-architecting front-end legacy systems to support faster delivery, improved reliability, and new customer experiences across Next UK, International and Total Platform.
View
Credit Sign Up Journey
Optimising the Credit sign-up journey for NextPay and Pay in 3, delivering +7% conversion uplift while reducing complexity and drop-off.
View
Product Page Modernisation
The shop window for hundreds of thousands of products across UK and International. 40% of traffic start their journey here, so after years of incremental optimisation, it was time for a fundamental rethink.
ViewDiscover, Optimise & Deliver
Just Another Day
My role is split across three key areas, ensuring we continuously identify new opportunities, improve existing experiences, and successfully deliver projects that create value for both customers and the business.
Optimise
Alongside discovery work, we constantly look for opportunities to improve the existing experience. A key part of this is regularly “walking the site” as a customer, browsing products, searching, and completing purchases to ensure everything works as expected.
We review areas such as product imagery, information, pricing, performance and usability. When opportunities are identified, we propose experiments through our A/B testing platform Exponea, to validate whether improvements positively impact both customer experience and commercial performance.
Discovery
Discovery is where many of our most valuable improvements originate. I regularly review key data funnels with the team to understand how customers move through our experiences and where friction or drop-offs occur.
We combine this with insights from user research, market analysis, competitor reviews, call centre feedback, and customer complaints to identify the most important problems to solve.
From there we define clear problem statements, run collaborative workshops, explore ideas, and user test concepts. Only once solutions are validated and backed by strong insight do they become candidates for future seasonal projects.
Deliver
A core part of my role is supporting projects that are actively being delivered. I work closely with Product Owners, Business Analysts, and my design team to ensure we are solving the right problems and delivering the best possible customer experience.
This involves reviewing designs, aligning with product strategy, supporting the team through delivery, and ensuring the final experience meets both user needs and commercial goals.
Artificial Intelligence
Don't Get Left Behind
AI is rapidly becoming a core part of modern digital workflows, particularly within our industry. As a leader, I see it as my responsibility to ensure both my own skills and those of my team stay at the forefront of this shift.
I actively encourage a culture of exploration and adoption, where AI tools are not only used to improve efficiency today but also to unlock new ways of thinking and creating. By embedding this mindset into the team, we ensure we stay ahead of the curve rather than reacting to it.
Here’s are just a selection of the tools my team and I use daily. From quickening comms and managing tasks to accelerating prototyping and unlocking new ideas, AI is embedded across our workflows and plays a key role in how we now work.
Codex
Some recent examples of how my team and I embrace AI everyday.
Discovery
Using Gemini to analyse call centre log exports, transform raw data into clear, prioritised insights and actionable problem statements that directly impact projects and fixes.
Prototyping
Leveraging tools such as Figma Make, Claude and Codex, AI has significantly advanced our prototyping capabilities, enabling both rapid journey prototypes and more HTML prototypes that closely mirror real-world interactions.
International
LLMs such as GPT and Gemini enable my team to rapidly analyse international markets, uncovering local shopping behaviours and preferences to validate design decisions and focus research where it matters most.
Day to day tasks
With Gemini embedded across Google Workspace, AI is part of our daily workflow. We use it to summarise meetings, generate actions, support emails and presentations, and streamline team communication. It also helps with document drafting, research synthesis, and structuring ideas, enabling faster, clearer decision-making.
Recent AI Certifications
I’ve recently completed a number of Google courses focused on productivity, prompt engineering and generative AI, building a strong foundation in both the principles of AI and the Gemini ecosystem. I’m now continuing this journey by focusing on AI leadership, with the aim of driving more strategic adoption and impact across my team.
This website has been designed in Figma and built using Codex. Having explored a range of AI tools over the past year, Codex stands out for producing high-quality, complex HTML and CSS output, making it my preferred tool for more advanced prototyping and front-end builds.
Contact
Michael Featherby - UX Design Manager
Well, that's me, a UX Manager & Designer who still gets hands-on, clear thinking over shiny ideas, measurable outcomes, not opinions.
Get in touch
mike.featherby@gmail.com