Melbourne · CX & experience design leadership
I partner with executives to shape the strategy, then stay in the room until it lands. Boardroom to build, and the steady hand brought in when an at-risk program needs a reset.
Partnered with
Most transformation work fails quietly, in the gap between the slide and the sprint. My job is to close that gap: aligning executives, designers and delivery teams around one plan, then staying close enough to it that it actually ships.
How I approach an engagementBuilt on the double diamond and human-centred design, the industry-standard approach I've worked in throughout my career.
At Bound I helped sharpen the agentic role at each stage, with a human gate at every one.
Work loops back whenever the evidence calls for it.
Where I add most is the full span, from shaping the commercial opportunity before Align to staying on as a trusted partner after Monitor. Tap any stage.
Enter at any stage · Loop back anytime · A human gate at every one
Opening the relationship
Shaping the opportunity with client leadership: the problem worth solving, the commercial case, pricing, resourcing and proposal. The engagement starts with a clear question and a reason to invest in answering it.
Establish project vision
The common goal is explored across teams, organisations and customers.
Define the goals, the areas to investigate, the research questions and how to achieve them.
Take notes across meetings and interviews, and assist in workshop and interview preparation.
Research and insights
The fuzzy idea becomes a grounded problem.
Challenge assumptions, judge what counts as evidence and decide what matters.
Classify claims, cluster the themes and architect the final deliverables.
Prioritise solutions
The problem is addressed with prioritised hypotheses.
Theme the evidence into core insights, choose the few opportunities worth pursuing and set the direction.
Rank opportunities by impact, effort and evidence, and draft the blueprint and roadmap for review.
Ideate, design and test
The idea becomes tangible, clickable, testable, valuable.
Direct the concept, judge desirability and quality, decide what to test and interpret the results.
Produce concept variations, draft UI and copy, assemble clickable prototypes and test scripts.
Build, test and launch
The idea becomes real, tested software matching the spec.
Own scope and acceptance, assure quality and risk, and make the release and go-live decisions.
Draft specs and acceptance criteria, accelerate code and coverage, and flag defects for triage.
Check, control, correct
The proven idea is measured to success and keeps improving.
Set and own the measures of success, read performance against intent, decide what to keep, kill or scale.
Instrument and collect performance data, surface anomalies and draft the performance readout.
Staying in the room
Reading performance against intent with leadership, deciding what to keep, kill or scale, and shaping what comes next. This is where one engagement becomes a multi-year partnership, and where the loop back to business development starts.
The relationship rarely ends at Monitor. Trusted-advisor work loops straight back into new business development, which is why my accounts tend to grow into multi-year partnerships rather than one-off projects.
A service blueprint is usually accurate on the day it's signed off and out of date the day after. Dynamic blueprinting treats it as software instead: all evidence lands in one ledger, and the blueprint is simply a view over it. Here's the framework in four steps, using an everyday example: returning an online order.
Interviews, site visits, data and workshops all land in the same ledger before anything is mapped. Nothing lives only in someone's notebook.
Each input becomes atomic claims: one statement per row, typed as fact or hypothesis, with a source and a date. That's what makes a finding defensible months later.
When two claims disagree, both stay on the board with their sources attached. Often both are true and the real question is a definition, which is far cheaper to settle in discovery than in delivery.
Both are true: one clock starts at the warehouse, the other at drop-off. One definition gets agreed and becomes the baseline.
The current and target state blueprints are views over the ledger. When new evidence lands, the views re-run and every step keeps its link to the claims behind it. Try adding a late input.
Illustrative example.
Synthesis runs continuously, so findings arrive during discovery rather than in a block at the end of it.
Every claim keeps its lineage, so decisions survive challenge, sponsor changes and new delivery partners.
Steps are marked proposed or retired against the step they replace: a build list and a stop-doing list, not a report.
A number without lineage is an opinion. An insight without a traceable source is the same thing in a nicer font.
Research, agents, design system and code run as one loop, so evidence flows through to a live, versioned artefact instead of a static file, and what's learned in delivery feeds the next round of research.
Interviews, ethnographic shadowing, workshops and analytics. Every input becomes a sourced, atomic claim in the ledger.
↺ Delivery feeds new evidence back into research, and the loop runs again.
Every client engagement since 2022 has been led from within Bound. They sit inside that role below, framed by what changed rather than what I was called.
Bound, part of The Omnia Collective
Principal-level across the full arc of an engagement, from executive strategy through to hands-on delivery. Account leadership, pricing and resourcing, presales and capability uplift, and the first call for project rescue. Omnia is an Australian group of 300+ data, AI, digital experience and technology specialists.
Showing all 7 engagements
Led an agentic, human-in-the-loop research engagement with financial advisers, building an evidence layer that turned insight into clean journeys and set up Generation Life's next phase of transformation.
Leading CX strategy across digital sales journeys at the intersection of product, data and business. Agentic workflows turned fragmented digital sales operations into a prioritised, delivery-ready roadmap, and blended quantitative and qualitative insight now supports data-led decisions at executive level.
Engagement lead for the CX stream. Combined CSAT, CES and SUPR-Q with UX/UI heuristics to pinpoint critical experience gaps, used agentic tooling to accelerate synthesis and prioritisation, then handed ownership to a senior team member for sustainable delivery.
Led a design squad inside Westpac's national tech simplification program, spanning Controlled Monies, Business and Consumer banking, Mortgages, Credit Cards and High Net Worth. Grew the engagement from one contributor to 5+ embedded team members and built an AI-driven component library that cut CX blueprint delivery from about a week to a day.
Directed research, hypothesis validation and executive playback to reimagine the AFL homepage for new and casual fans, embedding product-led thinking that reshaped internal workflows and decision-making.
Engagement lead across cross-functional teams of up to 15. Facilitated high-stakes workshops to land a governance framework and roadmap that reached ~80% completion in 12 months, securing lasting adoption and stakeholder buy-in.
Led CX and DesignOps for AGL's login and authentication refactor, balancing usability, trust and risk posture while streamlining agile delivery and aligning to the enterprise design language.
No Moss Co
Built the design practice from the ground up: standards, component library governance and design-led revenue streams. Led design thinking workshops with teams of 14, from C-suite to junior, on a global LMS, health and recruitment platform.
atisfy
Two promotions in under 18 months, from UX/UI Designer to leading UX, UI and branding globally across atisfy and its subsidiaries, including Growth Marketing Genie and Game Marketing Genie.
Foundations
Eight years across interactive, print and brand work, often client-facing, that built the commercial instincts I still use.
UX, UI and motion for interactive touch apps, digital signage, kiosks and video walls, plus the company website redesign end to end.
Client workshops, brand strategy and account management alongside print and digital design, pre-press and quality control.
Graphic and web design for a growing masterclass business. My first experience working alongside a successful entrepreneur.
Two weeks in pre-press and packaging design that confirmed design was the right path.
Running in parallel
A freelance illustration, branding and graphic design practice that has run alongside every role above. It's why the strategy work always holds together visually.
Outside the work, I'm a proud father and family man. The rest of my time goes to music and drumming, fitness, golf and AFL footy.
Why static blueprints decay the day after sign-off, and what changes when the blueprint is software rendered from a live evidence layer.
Why transformation succeeds or fails on trust, not tooling, even as AI moves further into the design process.
Work
Engagements I've led at Bound, filtered by industry. Full case studies include client detail, so I share them privately on request.
From one insight to production
Every artefact traceable to the customer
Illustrative example
A traceable evidence layer for the next transformation phase
Led an agentic, human-in-the-loop research engagement with financial advisers, turning insight into clean journeys and setting up the next phase of transformation.
Request the case study →Weeks of journey mapping and synthesis compressed into days
Leading CX strategy across digital sales journeys at the intersection of product, data and business, turning fragmented operations into a prioritised, delivery-ready roadmap.
Request the case study →~$200K incremental funding; CX made a funded capability
Combined CSAT, CES and SUPR-Q with UX/UI heuristics to pinpoint experience gaps, then institutionalised CX and handed ownership to the team.
Request the case study →$3M+ sustained revenue and ~20–30% less rework
Led a design squad inside a national tech simplification program across business, consumer, mortgages and cards, growing from one contributor to 5+ embedded.
Request the case study →Discovery that grew into a lasting advisory partnership
Directed research, hypothesis validation and executive playback to reimagine the homepage for new and casual fans.
Request the case study →$50k engagement grown into a $1M+ multi-year program
Engagement lead across teams of up to 15, landing a governance framework and roadmap that reached ~80% completion in 12 months.
Request the case study →Adaptive MFA and CDR Tranche 2 compliant experiences shipped
Led CX and DesignOps for a login and authentication refactor, balancing usability, trust and risk posture.
Request the case study →Earlier roles across UX, UI, brand and interactive design are on the career timeline.
Blog
Notes from the work: what holds up, what doesn't, and what changes when agents join the team.
Why static blueprints decay the day after sign-off, and what changes when the blueprint is software rendered from a live evidence layer.
Read the piece →Why transformation succeeds or fails on trust, not tooling, even as AI moves further into the design process.
Four principles for multiplying your impact by growing the skills of the people around you.
What Horizon Zero Dawn teaches about recognition, documentation, control, error recovery and consistency.
Gianluca Caico, Omnia Enterprise · · 6 min read
A financial services business reported that roughly one in five applications in its assisted channel were straight-through. The figure was well established internally and was shaping the investment case.
A day spent alongside the operations team produced a different picture. Applications counted as straight-through were being checked, re-keyed between systems and followed up by people.
Both readings were correct. Straight-through processing has no single agreed definition. The business measured data arriving digitally through the form, which is common and defensible. The stricter benchmark most of the market quotes is an application completing without a human touching it. Same operation, two definitions, two very different views of the available headroom.
The useful part is not that the gap existed. Gaps like that exist in most programmes. It is that both readings were on the board, sourced and reconciled, inside four weeks, which happened because of the artefact they landed in rather than because of who was in the room.
That is an infrastructure question, and it is the one most transformation programmes get wrong. They rarely fail on strategy. They fail on continuity. The reasoning behind a decision leaves with the sponsor who made it. A delivery partner joins nine months in and re-opens choices already settled on evidence, because the evidence is in a slide deck nobody can search. A backlog item gets descoped without anyone noticing it carried the strongest finding in the research.
The common factor is the deliverable. Discovery produces a service blueprint, the map of how a service works front to back, and that blueprint is accurate on the day it is signed off and decaying from the day after. Nielsen Norman Group named the problem in 2019, across 97 practitioners: keeping a high-fidelity blueprint current once the service changes. The default answer is still a static file and someone's promise to maintain it. A programme that cannot trace a decision back to its evidence re-decides it, at delivery rates rather than discovery rates.
Dynamic blueprinting is our answer to that. A service blueprint built as software, rendered from a live evidence layer, running inside an agentic delivery model. It is the process we bring to a client, not a document we leave behind.
Four things make it work.
Every input lands in one ledger before anything is mapped: interviews, workshops, ethnographic observation, product documentation, quantitative analytics. Each is broken into atomic claims, one statement per row, typed as fact, hypothesis or assumption, then sourced, dated, attributed to an actor and a journey stage, and rated for confidence. Every claim has lineage. First-hand observation outranks second-hand report, corroboration across independent sources raises confidence, and claims that contradict each other are flagged and investigated rather than merged into something that reads clean. That last rule is why two incompatible readings of a straight-through rate can sit side by side with their sources attached, instead of one of them being smoothed away in synthesis.
A claim is an atomic statement attributed to a role and a journey stage, not a transcript of a named individual, so what the ledger carries is the finding rather than the raw recording. Source material stays inside the client's environment under their access controls and retention rules, participants are briefed on how their input will be used, and the agentic lane only ever operates on material the engagement is scoped to. In regulated work this is not an add-on. It is the condition for running the approach at all.
Views that are rendered, not drawn. The blueprint is a view over the ledger. New evidence does not trigger a rewrite, it re-runs the view, and the current state, the target state and every principle and persona move with it. Nothing downstream loses its thread, because each element still resolves to the claim and source that produced it.
The blueprint is built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, driven by a component library designed in Figma. The design system and the live artefact are one ecosystem rather than two files kept in sync by hand, which is what keeps every step described at the same level of detail and lets a board spanning a dozen journey stages and several actor groups read as one system. Because it is code, it updates as evidence lands rather than at the end of a sprint. It is interactive, so a sponsor can move between the whole system and a single step, open a friction point and read the claims and confidence ratings underneath it. It opens in a browser, so there are no licences, no exported copies in circulation and no single owner of the master. And it is structured data, so every step resolves to an item a delivery team can pick up, and an agentic layer can operate on it directly.
Two lanes run in parallel across align, discover, define, design, deliver and monitor. The human lane sets intent, interprets, prioritises and decides, with a gate before anything advances a stage. The agentic lane prepares and collects, classifies claims, synthesises and drafts the views. Machines read everything and sort it consistently. They are poor at judging what matters. The lane split is drawn on exactly that line.
Rigour on its own produces a defensible artefact nobody opens. Craft on its own produces a compelling artefact nobody can defend. Dynamic blueprinting holds the two together, which is why the ledger and the interface are described here as one thing.
Three outcomes, in the order a programme feels them.
Evidence becomes available in days rather than at the end of discovery, because synthesis runs continuously instead of in a block at the end.
Findings survive challenge and outlast the people who found them, because every claim carries its source, date and confidence, and the reasoning sits in the artefact rather than in the heads of the people who ran the workshop. In the case above, that turned an argument about a number into a decision about a definition. One definition was agreed, it became the baseline the target state is measured against, and instrumenting touch time became a recommendation rather than a dispute.
The target state arrives in delivery units. Steps are marked proposed or retired against the step they replace, so the output is a build list and a stop-doing list rather than a set of recommendations someone still has to translate.
On that engagement the numbers were over 400 claims, 108 of them at fact confidence, distilled into 17 problem themes, eight design principles and 16 target-state opportunities, in four weeks. What the client held at the end was not a report. It was a working artefact still connected to its evidence.
The approach earns its cost where evidence is contested, distributed or long-lived. Regulated industries where a design decision has to be defensible a year later. Programmes spanning several systems and several vendors, where no single group holds the whole picture. Anywhere a reported metric and the observed reality are likely to diverge, which is most places once automation is in the mix. It is less useful on a short, contained piece of work with one stakeholder and a clear brief.
The shift underneath this is one data and AI teams made years ago and design has been slow to follow. Provenance matters. A number without lineage is an opinion, and an insight without a traceable source is the same thing in a nicer font. As organisations put agentic systems into customer journeys the pressure only increases, because a model acting on a customer's behalf will eventually need what a regulator needs: a clear account of why the experience was designed this way, and on what evidence.
None of which replaces the fundamentals. The discipline is still design thinking and human-centred research, and the day alongside the operations team is what surfaced the straight-through gap, not the tooling. What the tooling changes is the infrastructure those methods run on, and how long their output stays usable. Static deliverables cannot carry that. Living ones can, well after the engagement closes.
Dynamic blueprinting is one capability inside the agentic design model we run from align through to monitor, with a human gate at every stage. How the rest of that model works, and where we are deliberate about keeping a machine away from a decision, is the next piece.
Source: Nielsen Norman Group, Service Blueprinting in Practice (2019).
Gianluca Caico is a Lead Experience Designer at Bound, a boutique digital consultancy combining strategy, human-centred design and engineering. His background is in design thinking, human-centred design and customer strategy, leading discovery and transformation work across financial services, healthcare and utilities. Bound is part of The Omnia Collective, a group of founder-built Australian businesses across technology, design, data, AI and talent.
Gianluca Caico · · 3 min read
Every leader I meet wants transformation to happen faster, with trust intact. With AI now infused into the design process, that balance is finally possible.
Digital transformation has been a buzzword for years, but living it is very different from talking about it. What I've learned is this: transformation isn't about the technology you put in place. It's about people (customers, staff and stakeholders) and how you connect strategy to delivery in ways that create real change.
What's shifting fast is how AI is reshaping this work. In the past, building a service blueprint, synthesising research, or crafting personas for different customer cohorts could take days, sometimes weeks. Today, with the right models and frameworks in place, those same outputs can be generated in hours: still grounded in data, still validated with stakeholders, but at a pace that makes transformation more responsive and actionable.
This blend of AI, structured frameworks, and human-centred leadership has become my playbook, and ensures more time can be focused on the things that matter.
AI isn't a replacement for the human side of design. Empathy, curiosity and trust still do the heavy lifting. What AI offers is speed, repeatability, and the ability to scale.
In practice, I use AI to:
The value comes from creating repeatable processes that save time without cutting corners.
No two transformations are the same, but the structure I use is consistent:
AI accelerates each of these phases, but the impact comes from their continuity, from strategy to blueprint to requirements to delivery. That's how transformation sticks.
Even with AI in the mix, one thing hasn't changed: transformation is still about people.
Without trust and alignment, nothing moves. Strong relationships, shared understanding, and influence are what turn strategies into realities.
AI helps by freeing up time from manual synthesis, allowing me to invest more in the conversations and workshops where transformation either gains traction or stalls.
With AI infused into the design process, stakeholders can see more value:
This shift isn't incremental. It's transformative. By streamlining research, blueprinting and requirements, AI enables organisations to move from strategy to delivery with speed and confidence.
AI won't replace designers, strategists, or leaders. It will elevate how we work, sharpening insights, speeding execution, and freeing us to focus on what matters most: trust, decisions, and outcomes.
Gianluca Caico is a Lead Experience Designer at Bound, part of The Omnia Collective, leading CX strategy and transformation work across financial services, health, energy and sport.
Gianluca Caico · · 2 min read
From the archive. First published January 2023.
In this ever-growing landscape of the design industry, the gap between things like AI and product design is shortening.
Which is why a T-shaped skill set, one that influences team growth and culture, is becoming more and more prevalent in 2023. To meet the needs of broadening business objectives, there is more value in multiplying your knowledge by growing the skill set and ability of a teammate or stakeholder than in addressing the task yourself.
A product lens and a facilitation toolkit are vital to draw upon in this context. This powerful combination will support you in understanding themes such as the intrinsic why, assumptions, hypotheses, perceived value and success metrics for any business problem, from planning and service design to leveraging AI in product features.
Uncovering how to solve for these themes can be addressed with four key principles.
Designers should facilitate stakeholder workshops with the aim of uncovering customer and business objectives, results and outcomes. Address any lagging indicators that support leading indicators.
Use intended outcomes as the basis for uncovering assumptions and finding a critical hypothesis to test through prototyping, monitoring and iterating. UX research and content methods should be leveraged in this phase.
Gear your experiment for success. The experiment needs to be geared toward achieving a success metric, like an intended OKR for the business or an intended outcome for a user, that ties back to a leading indicator or outcome.
Ensure a psychologically safe space. The purpose of a workshop is to encourage active listening, alignment, questions and suggestions that surface business or user needs. Setting this expectation with a fun ice breaker can do the trick, and sets up a sequence of successful sessions.
As the spectrum of our industry continues to broaden, draw on your creativity to keep adding breadth and depth to the roles of others, so you share success together. Channel product and facilitation methods that align your team, assess lagging indicators and produce actionable leading indicators that encourage testable hypotheses. Share, promote and showcase results that circle back to the objective and its congruency with business value.
Gianluca Caico is a Lead Experience Designer at Bound, part of The Omnia Collective, leading CX strategy and transformation work across financial services, health, energy and sport.
Gianluca Caico · · 5 min read
From the archive. First published July 2020.
In a time when video gaming has reached record-breaking heights, due to so much time spent indoors, gamification has more of a place now than ever before.
Gamification is a process originally derived from video games, where reward systems are built into software with the sole purpose of ensuring player retention and engagement, rewarding players with micro-interactions and gold stars. If we use a project management platform as an example, selecting the 'completed task' button triggers a short, purpose-built interaction or animation, scientifically designed to release a micro dose of endorphins.
But how do video games specifically use UX techniques that can serve as inspiration? Having recently completed the main quest in Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4, I took note of how a well-developed AAA video game demonstrates good UX-driven practices and models, which allow seamless focus on the gameplay itself. Great job, Guerrilla Games.
I made note of the key features that successfully tap into the heuristics and principles of UX and UI.
Early on, the player is taught that botany plays a huge role in the game. The player is encouraged to collect flowers via in-game tutorials whilst roaming the open world, and flowers are used for crafting provisions. The red flowers, however, are consumed by the protagonist, Aloy, upon collection, and help the player regain health. An obvious colour choice, but why is it obvious? Because humans are conditioned from a young age to memorise red as the universal colour for health.
The use of colour is strong in video games. Apart from dressing characters in darker tones to indicate evil, Horizon Zero Dawn also teaches the player to instinctively look for contrasting colours during an initial tutorial. A dash of yellow on a grey wall indicates an interactive element: subtle enough to blend into the 3D decor, yet noticeable enough to draw the player's attention. The recognition of colour ensures good usability. The balance of colour to indicator succeeds in having the player memorise a pattern of colours, allowing fluid gameplay through the usability of interactive elements within the open world.
Accessibility is clearly at the forefront of navigating the UI and menu. Players can easily access resources by pressing their controller's touchpad, which opens a full-screen menu. Within it are horizontal categories (skills, inventory, crafting, map, quests and notebook), each paired with vertical subcategories. The purpose of the menu is to allow modification to suit the player's style of play.
Is the player a prowler, a brave or a forager? To ensure the player understands each weapon and skill upgrade, a space within the UI, usually on the right-hand side of the screen, is dedicated to video snippets documenting an in-game scenario of how each item performs. This is a perfect solution to the problem of educating players about the plethora of available modifications. The video placement ensures the player's attention is always on the form (the skill or weapon) followed by the function (the snippet preview).
Horizon Zero Dawn is an open-world game. The freedom of roaming the open world is a by-product of the story's key objective: to save the world from evil takeover by ancient machines. Quest progress runs the gamut of settings, from snow and desert to jungle. Aloy endures battles with majestic machines of prey, fighting them off using tripcasters, traps, bows, arrows and her primary weapon of choice, the staff. The player makes full use of the free-roam aspect, climbing cliff drop-offs with parkour-esque agility. Visual cues support the freedom of play by guiding direction, for example through deliberately designed, eroded paths, adding value as Aloy uncovers hidden ruins circa 2060.
Underneath the hood of the beautifully designed game are game mechanics, and game mechanics drive player actions. Each battle connection and each movement while climbing a cliff face is individually produced to enhance the player's overall freedom of movement, driving home the open-world style. Each movement is communicated to the controller with dynamic vibrations, executed so well in Horizon Zero Dawn that the player falls victim to exploring the beautiful open world instead of focusing on the target objective. This win-win adds value to the player experience: the more playtime the player has, the more they can memorise the in-game controls.
Games are one big problem just waiting to be solved. The core problem is split into hundreds of mini problems, much like a kanban board. The game is littered with collectibles and rare items hidden at various points throughout the open world. To access one of these seldom-seen objects, the player must decode a set of four wall-mounted digital combination locks beside a door. Graffitied on the door is a list of four numbers.
The onus is on the player to use their critical thinking and diagnose the problem in two parts: first, what the sequence actually means, and second, how to apply the sequence to obtain the reward. How would the player interpret a pattern of 1200, 1500, 1600, 2200? It is 24-hour time. This forces the player to tap into one of the brain's cognitive motor skills, procedural knowledge: the recognition of patterns rather than the recall of specific data. The player lines up each rotating lock with the angle resembling each timestamp. It is credible because of its social value, prompting players to learn something they may not already know.
Within the weapons inventory is a circle split into quarters: top, bottom, left and right. Each segment is a weapon slot, and the position of each slot in the full-screen menu directly correlates to the player's in-game weapon dial. Assigning a weapon to each slot forms a mental model, which the player subconsciously memorises.
Thanks to this consistency between the resource and in-game menus, the player's experience is enhanced, and on-the-fly weapon changes can be made mid-battle. Our brains require less cognitive load when mental mapping through consistent models. As an example, Player X may have an affinity for the left slot over the top, bottom and right slots, so they assign their main weapon to the left. As we go deeper into a world where tech is becoming an extension of our body, the degree to which we can personalise our tech is paramount.
Other than a reward system, what else can the software, tech and design industries learn from immersive video games like Horizon Zero Dawn? On the surface it can appear that the next generation is wasting its brains on video games. Wrong. The future of UX is in the hands of a generation subconsciously studying neurological thought processes through critical thinking, mental models and procedural knowledge. Players continuously draw on cognitive function to navigate through games, developing a familiar feel for good UX practice. Those practices will be more relevant than ever when we face finely tuned virtual and augmented reality norms in the years to come.
Horizon Zero Dawn is developed by Guerrilla Games and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Gianluca Caico is a Lead Experience Designer at Bound, part of The Omnia Collective, leading CX strategy and transformation work across financial services, health, energy and sport.
