Catherine
Power

Catherine Power
Catherine Power Product Designer & UX Strategist

I design end-to-end product experiences across mobile and web — translating complexity into clarity, and turning ambiguous problems into high-quality, user-centered outcomes backed by research and grounded in real user needs.

Design + strategy, end-to-end. 15 years of product design across financial services, e-commerce, fintech, and telecom. I design complex flows, prototypes, and UI across mobile and web — grounded in research, aligned with business goals, and built to hold up through engineering handoff. I also mentor designers and advocate for the standards that keep quality consistent at scale.

End-to-End Product Design Mobile & Web Design Systems Thinking Cross-functional Collaboration Design Systems & Governance Data-Rich UX & Complex Workflows
00 The Approach
Design + Strategy + Content

End-to-end.
From problem
to polished.

I've spent years doing the work — designing flows, building systems, running critiques, mapping architectures. That hands-on design foundation allows me to understand what goes into a project from start to finish. I know exactly what it costs to change a system late, what happens when teams aren't aligned, and what a user actually needs at a decision point.

Working in this role will open up doors to operate earlier in the process. I would love to be a part of what gets built, how teams collaborate, and how experiences connect across an organization — not just executing within those constraints.

What I bring

  • 15 years of end-to-end product design
  • Complex flows, wireframes, and prototypes across mobile and web
  • Leading discovery, framing problems, and shaping solutions
  • Design system ownership, governance, and contribution
  • Mentoring designers and advocating for UX standards at scale

Where I envision

  • Complex products where design and content both matter
  • Cross-functional teams that ship meaningful work
  • Roles that span strategy, craft, and execution
  • Environments where standards and quality are taken seriously
01 Selected Work
10 Projects
01

Vanguard · Financial UX · Decision Systems

Tax-Efficient Retirement Strategy (TERS)

Led end-to-end product design for TERS — a complex, data-rich retirement planning tool at Vanguard. Translated financial models, Social Security timing, and Roth conversion logic into clear, navigable decision flows that advisors and clients could actually act on.

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The Problem

Retirement decisions are deeply interdependent — tax-deferred vs. Roth vs. taxable, Social Security timing, withdrawal order. Existing tools lacked continuity and made it hard for users to understand tradeoffs across time.

My Role

  • Designed end-to-end experience over 4 years
  • Translated financial models into intuitive flows
  • Built withdrawal strategy flows + Roth conversion calculator
  • Designed recommendation & projection outputs
  • Collaborated with product, strategy & financial modeling teams

Strategic Approach

  • Broke complex multi-variable logic into step-by-step flows
  • Designed decision frameworks for high-stakes planning
  • Used visualizations to communicate long-term outcomes
  • Balanced accuracy with usability at key decision points

Scope

4-year engagement · End-to-end product design · Complex data-rich financial platform · Figma + Miro · Advisor + client-facing

Reflection

TERS is the kind of complex, data-rich product where design decisions require deep domain understanding, strong information architecture, and the ability to make difficult tradeoffs legible to users and stakeholders alike.

Why It's Strategic

Working on TERS meant operating end-to-end — from understanding complex financial models with product and engineering to producing high-quality, production-ready UI that advisors and clients could trust.

Impact

TERS: Created an actionable retirement income planning experience enabling users to understand complex tax strategies and build confidence in high-stakes decisions. TORI: Enabled advisors to seamlessly surface tax strategies to clients, creating a shared decision-making experience across a dual-interface system.

Designed Interfaces — TERS Product

Roth conversion calculator — laptop mockup

Roth Conversion Calculator — recommendation output with estimated conversion amount and tax cost breakdown

TORI intro page — Get more in retirement

Advisor intro page — "Get more in retirement" with 4-step onboarding flow and advisor drawer

Roth conversion calculator full page

Roth Conversion Calculator — full recommendation page with tax breakdown, Medicare IRMAA, and sharing checklist

Inputs used — demographic and income data

Inputs used — demographic and income inputs displayed alongside the recommendation for transparency

Process & Strategy Artifacts

Zero-Based Design Exercises — Context mapping facilitation

Zero-Based Design Exercises — Context mapping facilitation (laptop mockup)

ZBD Exercises Template — Mural board with exercises 1.1 and 1.2

ZBD Exercises Template — Context mapping + affinity clustering exercises

Full ZBD Mural board overview

Full ZBD Mural board — advisor and client exercise sequences

Feature prioritization Q1 2022 — Discovery prioritization dashboard

Feature/Discovery Prioritization Dashboard — Q1 2022 impact + effort analysis

TORI creatives and analysts needs backlog matrix

TORI Creatives & Analysts Needs — Backlog matrix across strategy, design, analytics

Data Integrity Message Discovery board

Data Integrity Message — Discovery board with problem definition, user needs, design options

Advisor Drawer Discovery board

Advisor Drawer — Discovery board with user testing needs, systems mapping, advisor flows

03

Vanguard · Experience Architecture · Org Alignment

DA / PA / WM Experience Architecture

Defined how experiences connect across four restructured product domains — mapping user journeys, identifying fragmentation, and aligning cross-functional teams around a shared experience architecture.

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The Problem

Organizational restructuring created fragmented experiences across four distinct product domains. Users encountered disconnected journeys and poor handoffs between self-service and advisor-led channels.

My Role

  • Partnered with stakeholders to define cross-domain connections
  • Mapped how users move across DA → PA → WM
  • Defined transition and handoff points between channels
  • Bridged client-facing and internal Crew systems
  • Contributed to future-state experience architecture

Strategic Approach

  • Mapped ecosystem fragmentation across domains
  • Identified critical transition moments in journeys
  • Aligned stakeholders across team boundaries
  • Built shared vision for connected experience ecosystem

Stakeholders

Cross-domain IA · Multi-team alignment · Experience continuity across channels

Why It's Strategic

Pure UX Strategy — working across org boundaries to shape how an ecosystem connects, requiring organizational influence as much as design skill.

Reflection

Alignment at the org level has to come before alignment at the experience level. You can't design your way out of a misaligned system.

Impact

Improved continuity across user journeys, supported a more unified product ecosystem, and enabled stronger alignment between teams operating across organizational and domain boundaries.

Visuals to be added: ecosystem / architecture diagrams · DA → PA → WM journey flows · stakeholder frameworks

04

Vanguard · Design Systems · Governance · Leadership

Constellation (C11n) Design System & Governance

Led the migration of Vanguard's designer team from legacy patterns to the new Constellation (C11n) design system — partnering with the VET (Vanguard Experience Team) to onboard designers, convert legacy components, run weekly cross-team critiques, and build the governance practices that made the system stick across multiple product teams.

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The Problem

Multiple teams used inconsistent patterns, creating fragmentation, rework, and a lack of shared design language. The legacy system couldn't scale with organizational growth and product complexity.

My Role

  • Guided transition from legacy system to C11n
  • Ensured consistent component usage across teams
  • Ran weekly design critiques across the org
  • Increased visibility into active design work
  • Reduced siloed decision-making

Design Critique Practice

Weekly critiques created a shared forum — aligning designers, reinforcing system usage, surfacing active work, and building a culture of collective decision-making, not just individual execution.

Scope

Multi-team adoption · Weekly governance cadence · Legacy → C11n migration

Reflection

The critique practice was as important as the system itself. Shared decision-making is what sustains a design system — not documentation alone.

Why It's Strategic

Design system work at this scale is organizational strategy — creating shared language, governance, and cultural practices that let design scale without fragmenting.

Impact

Measurably reduced design fragmentation across product teams — legacy patterns replaced with C11n-compliant components, critique culture embedded as ongoing governance, and designers across multiple teams confidently building within the new system.

05

QVC · Design Systems · Tokens · Component Library · Figma

QVC Design System — QEL (First Design System)

Founded and built QVC's first design system from scratch — the QVC Experience Library (QEL). Defined the full system architecture, established design tokens (color, typography, spacing), built the component library, and delivered living web documentation. I was the designated designer for this initiative, working end-to-end from whiteboard IA sessions through to Sketch symbol implementation and cross-team rollout.

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The Problem

QVC had no shared design language across digital platforms. Designers made independent decisions about color, type, spacing, and components — resulting in visual inconsistency, duplicated effort, and no scalable foundation for product work. There was no system, no tokens, no documentation.

My Role

  • Sole designated designer for QVC's first design system — owned the project end-to-end
  • Defined system architecture: tokens → components → patterns → templates → modules
  • Built the full token foundation: color with WCAG grades, type scale, spacing scale
  • Designed and documented 20+ components in Sketch with full symbol override systems
  • Delivered living web documentation (QEL) for cross-team use
  • Planned and facilitated whiteboard IA sessions to align engineering and product
  • Mapped Q1–Q4 delivery roadmap across foundation, components, and templates

Strategic Approach

Started with whiteboard sessions and sticky-note IA to define what the system needed to contain before touching Figma or Sketch. Built the token layer first — color with full WCAG accessibility grades, a 13-style type scale, and a 4px-base spacing system — so components had a stable, semantic foundation. Every component was documented with style, usage, code, accessibility, and guidelines tabs.

Scope

Color tokens · Typography scale · Spacing scale · 20+ components · Interaction patterns · Templates · Living web documentation · Sketch symbol library with full overrides · Multi-platform token naming (web/iOS/Android)

Reflection

Building a system from zero requires making a lot of decisions that feel small but compound — token naming conventions, override architecture, what goes in a module vs. a template. Getting the foundation right meant those decisions paid dividends every time a new component was added.

Why It's Relevant

This work demonstrates the full design systems skill set — not just contributing to an existing system, but founding one from scratch, making the architectural decisions, doing the token work, building the component library, and delivering documentation that teams could actually use.

Impact

Delivered QVC's first shared design language — a token-based system with WCAG-graded color, a 13-style type scale, 20+ documented components, and living web documentation. Enabled consistent design decisions across digital teams for the first time.

Living Documentation — Design System on Device

QEL on iPad — color tokens, font library, spacing scale

QEL living documentation — color palette, QVC font library, and spacing scale published as an accessible web reference across teams

System Architecture & Planning

QEL whiteboard — objectives, system architecture, Q1–Q4 roadmap

QEL objectives whiteboard — system architecture (Foundation → Components → Patterns → Templates → Modules), delivery system research, and Q1–Q4 roadmap with launch targets

Component library sticky note IA — alerts, badges, banners, buttons, cards

Component library IA — sticky note mapping of alerts, badges, banners, breadcrumbs, buttons, cards, checkbox, date picker, dropdown across styles and usage columns

Interaction patterns sticky IA — nav, search, sliders, tabs, toggles, tooltip

Interaction patterns IA — global navigation, search, spinners, progress bar, radio buttons, sliders, tabs, toast, toggles, and tooltip mapped with open design questions

Design Tokens — Color, Typography & Spacing

Color token system — WCAG accessibility grades per shade

Color token system — Midnight Pearl, Orange Sunrise, Grayskull, Blue Crush with full WCAG accessibility grades (AAA/AA/Do not use) for small and large text at each shade

Typography scale — 13 styles, sans-serif and serif

Typography scale — 13 named styles across sans-serif (xsmall–xxxlarge, Regular/Medium) and serif (small–xxxlarge, Semibold), 14–28px, with QVC Font Library download

Text color accessibility matrix — color combinations across all token pairs

Text color usage — named color roles (Grayskull, Midnight Pearl, Promo, Red Attention, Hooray) with color-on-color combination matrix and minimum WCAG size requirements

Component Specs & Sketch Implementation

Button component spec — primary, secondary, tertiary with 14px padding

Button component spec — primary, secondary, and tertiary variants with 14px padding all sides and text baseline annotations for engineering handoff

Sketch symbol overrides — PLP card with full content overrides

Sketch symbol system — PLP card (Large) with full content overrides: price, badge, promotional messaging, placeholder text, and component/badge nesting

Sketch text style library — multi-platform token naming

Sketch text style library — multi-platform token naming convention (web / iOS / Android) with color × alignment × size combinations, enabling single source of truth across platforms

06

QVC · E-commerce · Personalization

Recommendations Exploration

Explored and designed a product recommendations experience for QVC — rethinking how the carousel behaves, how products are surfaced, and how recommendation logic connects to the browsing experience across desktop and mobile.

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Focus

Designed recommendation carousel patterns, product display variants, tab structures, and PDP-level recommendation placements — exploring how to increase product discovery and conversion across QVC's digital experience.

Deliverables

  • Carousel redesign exploration
  • Tab display and product rec variants
  • Desktop and mobile carousel layouts
  • Product recommendation on PDP
  • Scroll interaction prototyping

Strategic Value

Recommendation systems are where personalization meets commerce strategy. This work required thinking both about interaction patterns and how the underlying data model shapes the user experience.

Research & Strategy

Research notes — cross-sell, personalization, recommendation types

Research synthesis — Baymard cross-sell guidelines, personalization vs. recommendation types, 10 carousel placement contexts

Competitive analysis — Glossier, Nordstrom, Wayfair

Competitive analysis — recommendation patterns across Glossier, Nordstrom, and Wayfair

Product Design Micro Test Phase 1 — touchpoints and carousel modules

Product Design — Micro Test Phase 1 planning: 14 touchpoints mapped, carousel module types defined

Carousel Design Explorations

Carousel 1 vs 1.1 — pagination dot variants

Carousel 1 vs 1.1 — pagination dot placement and navigation arrow variants

Carousel 2 vs 2.2 — card layout variants

Carousel 2 vs 2.2 — card layout with partial next-item reveal

Carousel 3 vs 3.1 — 'Want more fall fashion?' CTA variant

Carousel 3 vs 3.1 — end-of-carousel CTA card: "Want more fall fashion?" exploration

Looks we love — bags carousel

Live carousel — "Looks we love: Fall Fits" bags with New / Easy Pay labels and wishlist

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Scroll interaction

Scroll interaction prototype — carousel scroll behavior animation

Recommendation Placements — Live Patterns

Explore Electronics — tab-based recommendation

Explore Electronics — tab-style recommendation ("More in Canon" variant)

We think you'll love these — personalized reco with See All

"We think you'll love these" — personalized recommendation with See All end card

07

QVC · E-commerce · Product Experience

Product Detail Page Redesign

Redesigned QVC's product detail page across apparel and electronics — owning the full design lifecycle from CX research and competitive analysis through dev specs, button state systems, and production-ready mobile designs.

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Focus

Rethought product detail hierarchy for both apparel and electronics — designing for key decision points, warranty presentation, and button states across desktop and mobile contexts.

Deliverables

  • Desktop and mobile PDP layouts
  • Apparel-specific product detail design
  • Warranty experience (animated)
  • Button state system
  • Electronics PDP variant

Strategic Value

PDP design is conversion-critical — every decision about information hierarchy, trust signals, and interaction patterns directly affects purchase behavior.

Designed Interfaces — QVC Product Detail Page

QVC PDP — laptop mockup hero

QVC Product Detail Page — bareMinerals Rescue Stick with People Also Viewed rail, color swatches, Save with Sets

QVC PDP — flat view

PDP flat view — full layout with image gallery, EasyPay, color selection, reviews, and cross-sell

Research & Strategy — CX Runway

CX Runway Research

CX Runway Research — SpeedBuy data: 90% conversion rate, 21% revenue share, 550k mobile PDP clicks. Grounded design in real metrics.

Competitive analysis

Competitive analysis — PDP patterns across AE, Anthropologie, Glossier, Nordstrom, Target, and Wayfair

PDP Testing Playbook

PDP Testing Playbook — top initiatives (mobile first, PDP as landing page) and 10 A/B test opportunities

Design System — Button States & Interactions

Button states

Button states system — image/color + text variants across in stock, waitlist, sold out, hover, selected. 44px minimum touch target.

Warranty interaction

Warranty modal — animated post-add-to-cart upsell for product protection

Dev Specs — Desktop & Mobile

Desktop PDP dev spec

Desktop PDP annotated spec — photo/video, product title, price block, color matrix, promotion messaging

Mobile PDP dev spec

Mobile PDP annotated spec — scroll-through thumbnails, square color matrix with material images, size guide, delivery options

Final Mobile Designs

Mobile PDP mockup

Mobile PDP — apparel product with color swatches and EasyPay

Mobile PDP flat apparel

Mobile PDP flat — Similar Products + Recently Viewed rails, size fit indicator

Mobile PDP electronics

Mobile PDP electronics — warranty upsell modal, EasyPay, SpeedBuy CTA

08

AI Labs · FinTech · Dashboard Design

Axiom Client Dashboard

Designed a financial dashboard that allows users to easily digest their household's financial information — dividing complex data into digestible sections without overwhelming the user.

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Challenge

Financial dashboards often overwhelm users with data. The goal was to design an overview of a household's financial picture that felt clear and digestible — not like a data dump.

Approach

  • Divided household data into clear, separate sections
  • Prioritized overview-first information hierarchy
  • Grounded design in user research and whiteboard sessions
  • Designed desktop dashboard layout

Process

Research-grounded from the start — included whiteboarding and user testing sessions before moving to high-fidelity design, ensuring the architecture matched real user mental models.

Designed Interface — Axiom Client Dashboard

Axiom client dashboard — laptop lifestyle mockup

Axiom — financial dashboard with My Advisor panel, 90% Probability of Success indicator, Investment Allocation donut chart, and Net Worth summary

Process — Discovery, IA & Whiteboard Sessions

Advisor whiteboard — we have / we will have / big ideas

Advisor session — "We Have / We Will Have" framework: messaging, notifications, scheduling, household profiles, top clients. Big ideas: clean utilitarian aesthetic, avoid information flooding.

Advisor view IA whiteboard — 6 nav areas + screen sketches

Advisor view IA — 6 navigation areas (dashboard, clients, team, messaging, reports, help) with sketched wireframes pinned above

Advisor messaging feature sticky note IA

Messaging feature IA — sticky note mapping of DMs, chat history, full/mini/group chat, threads, search, tagging, offline messaging, audio conferencing

Dashboard sketches — my finances, networth CTA, planning iframe

Dashboard sketches — My Finances widget, Net Worth CTA cards (dismissable), Planning iframe with Goals prompt

Universal Add Flow sketch — 4-step flow

Universal Add Flow — 4-step sketch: select category → type selection → fill info → animated confirmation with nav routing logic

Client profile whiteboard wireframe — main + detail + add

Client profile wireframe — main view (about, accounts, property), detail view (personal property, real estate), add flow (name, type, value, growth rate)

Axiom Messaging — Designed Interfaces

Axiom messaging — iPhone mockup

Axiom Messaging — mobile message list with More Recent / All Households / Archived tabs and grouped household conversations

Messages list — flat mobile view

Mobile messages — conversation list with household groupings, avatar stacks, and timestamps

Axiom messaging desktop — thread view with People + Fact Finder panel

Desktop messaging — three-panel layout: conversation list · thread view with read receipts and quick replies · People + Fact Finder sidebar

Messaging whiteboard sketches — insurance flow + conversation view

Messaging whiteboard — insurance update flow, notification states, conversation view with send + document CTAs

Messaging whiteboard — client features, read receipts, add to message

Client features whiteboard — message history, read receipts, add to a message, offline messaging notification flow

Messaging whiteboard — insurance tagging and account linking

Tagging and account linking — conversation with insurance/accounts/property sections, needs checklist: history ✓, tagging ☐, read receipts ✓, embedded content ✓

09

Xfinity · Decision Tools · Conversion

Help Me Decide Tool

Designed Xfinity's "Help Me Decide" tool — a multi-step, personalized quiz experience that filtered offers based on user inputs, removing decision paralysis and driving a significant lift in BuyFlow conversion.

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The Problem

Users were abandoning the purchase flow due to decision paralysis when faced with product options. They needed a guided experience to help them choose the right product with confidence.

The Solution

Designed a decision-making tool that asked the right questions, filtered options, and guided users directly into the BuyFlow — reducing friction at the most critical conversion point.

Outcome

Significant conversion rate lift — a clear example of how decision design, not just visual design, drives measurable business outcomes.

Designed Interface — Help Me Decide Tool

Help Me Decide — tailored results iMac mockup

Help Me Decide — "Here are offers tailored for you" results with left-rail answer summary, editable filters, and personalized package grid

Quiz Flow — Step by Step

Step 1 — What are you shopping for?

Step 1 — "What are you shopping for today?" Internet + TV selected

Step 2 — Find My Speed

Step 2 — "Find My Speed" — device count mapped to recommended Mbps ranges (10–300 Mbps)

Step 3 — Select must-have channels

Step 3 — Must-have channel tier selector (10+ to 260+) with full channel grid

Step 4 — Premium channels Yes/No

Step 4 — "Are you interested in streaming premium channels?" Yes (Showtime + HBO) / No

User Flow & Results

User flow diagram

User flow — All Offers Landing Page → Find My Best Fit Package → Internet or Internet+TV → Find My Speed → filtered results

Find My Speed iMac mockup

Find My Speed — speed tier modal with device count selector, in context of Xfinity shop

Final filtered results — Find the Perfect Deal For You

"Find the Perfect Deal For You" — 4 packages filtered by quiz answers, pre-sorted by price

Results flat — editable answer rail

Results with editable answer summary rail and 3 filtered Internet + TV offers

Inline edit — Internet step active

Inline editing — first question active mid-results, editable without losing context

Why I'm the right fit

Senior designer.
End-to-end.
Figma-first.

15 years of end-to-end product design across financial services, e-commerce, fintech, and telecom. Deep experience designing complex flows across mobile and web, building and governing design systems, mentoring designers, and translating research and data into high-quality, production-ready product experiences. I've led work from the first whiteboard to the final handoff, always grounded in user needs and business outcomes.

Product Designer
TERS · Axiom · QVC

I translate complex financial systems into experiences users can navigate — making high-stakes decisions approachable, clear, and actionable at every step.

Mentor & Advocate
C11n · QEL · Critiques

I mentor junior and mid-level designers, lead critique sessions, and advocate for UX having a voice in product planning and decision-making. I build shared standards that keep quality consistent as teams and products grow.

Systems Builder
C11n · QEL · Figma

I've built design systems from scratch and led adoption across multi-team organizations — from founding QVC's first design system (QEL) to driving the Constellation (C11n) migration at Vanguard. Systems work is where craft meets org-level strategy.

02 Let's Talk

Complex systems.
Polished execution.
Research first,
always.

I bring 15 years of end-to-end product design — across mobile and web, financial services, e-commerce, and fintech. I design complex flows, build and govern design systems, mentor designers, and advocate for UX standards that keep quality consistent at scale. Research-informed from day one, and always built to ship.

Get in touch →
03 Writing
Writing & Thought Leadership

Medium · Vanguard UX Publication

Empathy: Why It's Good and How to Nurture It

Published on the Writing & Thought Leadership — writing about empathy in design practice and how teams can build and sustain it as a core skill, not just a workshop activity.

Read on Medium →

Medium · Vanguard UX

"Empathy: Why It's Good and How to Nurture It"

Writing about design practice — how empathy shapes decision-making and what it takes to build it as an organizational muscle, not just an individual skill.

medium.com/vanguard-ux