Phillips
Phillips is a leading international auction house specialising in contemporary art, design, watches, and jewellery. As the business accelerated its digital ambitions, the product team undertook a ground-up redesign of the entire client-facing digital experience — a new native iOS app, a responsive web platform, updated auction calendar, and a live Saleroom — underpinned by a new design system and digital brand identity.
Phillips' digital products had grown fragmented over time: an ageing native app, inconsistent UI across platforms, and a live bidding experience that was generating operational failures and client frustration during high-stakes auction windows. Internally, there was no shared design language or token structure to build from.
Research was emerging on a significant problem: bidding abandonment. With only 17.7% of registered users converting to active bidders, there was clear evidence that process friction, unclear advance bidding mechanics, and poorly timed communications were costing the business revenue at every sale. The opportunity was to redesign the end-to-end client journey — from discovery and registration through to live bidding — whilst simultaneously laying the foundation for the team to build and ship consistently going forward.
I worked with the design team at Phillips from 2024 to 2026. Helping direct and advance design on all fronts—design thinking and processes, product polish, and brand identity across digital platforms and mediums. I ran cross-functional workshops to map the end-to-end client journey, translating the findings into feature definitions and UX frameworks for each product phase. Collaborated closely with Product and a UX researcher on the Bidding Abandonment Rate study — contributing to qualitative testing, synthesis, and translating insights into design solutions across the registration, calendar, and live Saleroom experiences.
Alongside the product work, I led the implementation of a new digital brand direction — including a custom typeface commissioned from an external agency — and built a brand-new design system with shared tokens, a unified UI language, and a component library integrated into the codebase. This gave the engineering team a reliable, scalable foundation for the first time. Key areas I owned or co-led: the iOS app redesign, a full redesign of the auction calendar across native and responsive web, and the live Saleroom and bidding experience — the highest-priority work-stream following repeated failures during live sales.
The first phase of the new iOS app launched within six months, with the calendar redesign and live Saleroom following in subsequent phases through early 2026. The redesigned auction calendar drove significant registration intent — click-to-register nearly doubled from 618 to 1,100+ in a 90-day period — and qualitative testing confirmed that a card-based layout and an improved information hierarchy were better aligned with how clients actually navigate sale discovery.
The new design system established shared tokens and components across the codebase, reducing design-to-development friction and creating consistency across platforms for the first time. Most significantly, the new design directly addressed the factors driving bidding abandonment — clearer advance bidding mechanics, improved notifications, and a rebuilt live Saleroom experience. Overall bid conversion from registered users increased, with online live bids up following the redesign.
