Max Rickards

Good design is mostly deciding what to remove.

I've spent eight years doing that with the complicated systems people depend on.

Product Strategy

Rethinking how people access healthcare

Set where the app fits in the NHS's 10 Year Plan

Simplification

Redesigning how BP engineers work in the field

Cut the rounds cycle from 185 minutes to 67

Interaction Craft

Fixing how the NHS App asks for notifications

Redesigned the opt-in moment users kept dismissing

Design Systems

Building the design system that teams actually used

Solved for adoption, not just components

Systems Thinking

Undoing 20 years of built-up friction

Turned 148 fields into 14 simplified journeys

Max Rickards smiling back over his shoulder at a marina, wearing a cap and glasses, with sailboats and a cloudy sky behind him

Me

Senior Product Designer at IBM

I’ve spent the last eight years working on complex systems at scale, from healthcare to energy to government. I love the visual side, but often I spend my time in the tangled system beneath it. At the moment, it’s the NHS App. I've been prompt-engineering native (and HTML) prototypes for it, and I led the education that helped get my team fluent in the tech stack the job now demands. AI is changing how products get built, who builds them, and what's possible in the first place.

I'm a Londoner, and I love how much design this city puts into the world. Outside work I'm usually behind a camera (Fuji X100VI) or out of the city with friends for air that hasn't been through a tube tunnel.

Who I've worked with

© 2026 Max RickardsCV · Email · LinkedIn