Helen is the VP of Product and Experience for Publicis Sapient and has spent over three decades designing and building digital products in a variety of industries including Financial Services, Retail, Government and Energy Industries. Amongst many other adventures, her varied past includes delivering an internet banking refresh for a major South African bank with the primary focus on just making it easy to bank, implementing an AML program “agile-ly” despite the challenges around compliance and the regulator, supporting the digital transformation of a major Australian bank, building a market exchange for Distributed Energy Resources, designing and building the first computerised Customs systems for a sub-Saharan African country, and migrating a major South American airline from one GDD to another.
She believes that great, lasting products are the ones that provide solutions to general or specific problems, that deal with the functional challenges, and prioritise the human user’s needs, proclivities and experience levels. Having experienced some shockingly bad product design over the years, she is always on a mission to improve the space she’s in, to design and build great products that solve problems for people today without creating future problems. As Steve Jobs once said: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
