Simona Pau
Product & Service DesignerI build design decisions on evidence, not instinct.
I design complex products and services through research, accessibility, and close collaboration with engineering.
View selected workAbout
My background is rooted in psychology and research. I started in neuromarketing, studying how people perceive, decide, and react, and moved from there into UX, service design, and product.
How I work
I design products and services that have to work across organisations, operations, and the people using them every day. My work spans end-to-end design, from research and problem framing through service architecture, prototyping, and delivery. A polished interface matters, but it rarely solves the underlying problem on its own. Most of the real work happens before that, in figuring out what the problem actually is: a support directory that turns out to be a governance problem, a corporate website that turns out to be a positioning problem.
I work closely with engineering throughout a project, not just at handoff. I've debugged alongside developers and queried databases to understand what was actually happening, because staying involved until the build matches the intent is part of the job.
Accessibility is considered throughout the process, informing information architecture, content, components, and interaction patterns. I treat it as an ongoing design consideration and work with engineering to understand how those decisions translate into implementation.
What I try to leave behind isn't just an interface. It's something that helps a team keep making good decisions later on: a governance framework, a documented system, a process that holds up without me in the room.
Work
Selected case studies
88 ways to ask for help, and no way to find the right one
A support directory that had grown for years without logic, rebuilt around how people actually ask for help.
The site looked like a catalogue. The company felt like a community.
A product catalogue turned into something that finally sounded like the company behind it.
They asked for a terminal. We gave them a city service.
A street cabinet that existed only for the workers who opened it, turned into something useful for everyone who walks past.
Additional work
A wider view of what I'm building now and what I've delivered before, shown briefly rather than in full depth.
Internal platform for a national central bank
Designing one platform around very different users: companies filling in surveys, branch managers who send them out, survey owners who set the questions and timing, and the people who build and maintain it all. Mapping every journey into one coherent service.
AI adoption across enterprise design teams
A research initiative into how teams actually use AI in their daily work, combining surveys, interviews, and process mapping to surface adoption patterns, barriers, and where it genuinely helps.
Regional healthcare platform
A regional platform to manage and support territorial health services. Continuous work alongside frontend and backend developers, from requirements to testing and debugging in a live environment, with accessibility considered in line with public-sector requirements.
University portal
Research and design from stakeholder mapping and content inventory through workshops, card sorting, and a survey, ending in an interactive prototype of the key sections.
Banking app
UI design for a well-known Italian bank's mobile app, delivered in agile sprints within a UX/UI team and shaped by strict brand, compliance, and technical constraints.
Insurance app
A broker's tool to manage policies and open accident claims on the go, grounded in usability testing of the existing product and user interviews that shaped the redesign.
Experience
Designing complex digital products, enterprise platforms, and phygital service ecosystems across different sectors. Work spans research, service architecture, and delivery, with accessibility considerations, design systems, governance, and close engineering collaboration recurring across the work. Responsibilities also include stakeholder facilitation, design-team mentoring, and exploring AI-supported design and delivery practices.
Designed and evolved complex web applications and digital products for healthcare and public-sector organisations. Worked day to day with frontend and backend engineers, from requirements and UX/UI design through testing, debugging, and implementation. Accessibility was considered throughout the work in line with public-sector requirements. Managed and mentored the design team.
End-to-end UX and service design for national and European public-sector digital products, including university and social-security platforms. Conducted surveys, interviews, and co-design workshops, translating research into journeys, flows, and prototypes, with accessibility considered alongside cross-functional collaboration.
Research-driven design at an evidence-based consultancy: usability testing, user interviews, and heuristic evaluations feeding directly into UX/UI work for clients including an insurance-tech group and a major telecom operator. The place where grounding every design decision in observed behaviour became a working habit, not a principle.
UI design for a major Italian bank's mobile app, delivered in agile sprints within a small UX/UI team. Worked inside strict brand and compliance constraints, turning dense banking flows into clean, consistent interfaces and staying aligned with development sprint by sprint.
Earlier experience
Banking consultancy alongside an internal workflow UX initiative.
Qualitative and quantitative research, UX for the company website redesign.
Behavioural research with EEG, eye-tracking, and galvanic skin response.
Foundations
Tools
Contact
I love talking about design, research, and complex systems. If something here sparked your curiosity, write me. I'd genuinely like to hear from you.
