Freelance Product Designer · Trellis · project-based · remote-first, UK mytrellis.co.uk Trellis is a retirement guidance platform that spun out of Nesta's Mission Studio.
We help UK homeowners approaching and in retirement understand their financial position and plan with confidence - free of jargon, and free of anyone trying to sell them something.
We have a live product, real users, an established design system and a body of user research.
We're a small, newly independent team.
Do go and use the product before you apply - it'll tell you more than this listing can.
The work
We'd start with a structural read. One day.
We give you our research, our data on how people move through the product, and proper access to use it.
You come back with how you'd restructure the experience and why.
Then the architecture. Three to four days to turn that into a proposed structure with the key flows - enough for engineering to build from.
Then individual features, a day at a time, as they come up.
Each piece is scoped and agreed before it starts, with a deliverable we both recognise when it arrives.
Before each one we send a structured pack - the questions, the relevant research and data, and where to look - so your time goes on thinking rather than hunting for context.
It suits someone who likes a clear problem and a clear end point.
What the structural work covers
How the whole experience fits together: how people discover us and get to something valuable quickly, the core journey, the tools they come back to, and how the account grows with them.
You'd be working on top of an existing design system and component library.
The questions here are structural, not stylistic.
Research
We've talked to people in this audience since before launch and it has shaped the product every time.
The founder runs that programme, so you'd arrive with findings in hand rather than starting from nothing - and you're welcome in sessions whenever it helps.
Structural work gets validated with users in prototype sessions.
Who this suits
A senior product or UX designer who has owned consumer journeys and information architecture end to end
Someone who forms a view quickly from existing evidence, and says it plainly
Comfortable with no design team around you
Real interest in an audience that is sales-wary, jargon-averse and badly served by financial products
Happy inside a regulated perimeter - constraints on what we can say are part of the material
Financial services or regulated experience is a plus.
Pensions knowledge isn't required.
Experience designing for older adults is a real plus.
To apply
Email careers@mytrellis.co.uk with the subject line "Designer - [your name]", and tell me about one example where you reshaped how a product was structured, not just its screens, and what you were trying to solve.
If you've worked with an older audience, tell me about that too.
I'm hiring directly - no recruiters or agencies, please.