Brano Pales

Sydney, Australia · Available now

End-to-end service, UX and UI design

Lead product and service designer with 15+ years turning deep user research into scalable, accessible digital services — across federal and state government, banking, retail and SaaS.

Research that decides

Qual and quant studies that give teams evidence, not opinions.

Service blueprints

Current- and future-state journeys that expose the real dependencies.

Accessible UI, shipped

WCAG 2.1 AA component libraries built with the engineers who use them.

Australian Government — Department of Finance GovAI National Archives of Australia National Disability Insurance Agency NSW Government Aristocrat Westpac Woolworths Ernst & Young British Airways Optus

Selected work

Three projects that show how I work

All work →

How I work

Understand, then evidence, then design

Step 1

Understand the business

Stakeholder interviews, service mapping and constraint-finding, so the design solves the problem the organisation actually has.

Step 2

Research with real users

Contextual inquiry, interviews, surveys, card sorting and moderated testing — synthesised into personas, journeys and a prioritised backlog.

Step 3

Design, test, hand over

Wireframes to accessible high-fidelity UI and a component library the delivery team can actually build from.

15+

years end-to-end design

30+

clients, agency & client side

1,000+

hours of user research & testing

10M+

users with a better experience

References

What people I've worked with say

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Work

Research first, turning complex problems into simpler solutions

Three projects are written up in full. The rest are summarised — happy to walk through any of them in detail.

Case studies

Three full write-ups: context, role, method and outcome.

Recent engagements — Sydney, 2015–2026

Short summaries. Detailed artefacts available on request.

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Earlier work — London, 2007–2015

Short London agency and client-side engagements, kept for the record rather than the portfolio.

Contract has been the vehicle, not the preference. Where the work warrants it I stay: 4 years at Aristocrat, eighteen months at Woolworths, thirteen at the NSW Department of Education. Long engagements are where research compounds into a design system — and I'm equally open to permanent roles.

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About

A systems thinker who still draws the screens

I bridge the gap between deep qualitative and quantitative research, conceptual service design, and high-fidelity visual execution — usually on things that are too complex for any one of those alone.

Over fifteen years I've worked across government, enterprise, finance, retail and SaaS, on both the agency and client side. Recently that has meant leading service design and research for the National Disability Insurance Agency, reimagining the National Archives' public RecordSearch platform, and setting the UI direction for the Department of Finance's GovAI initiative.

I champion human-centred design and persuasive architecture inside cross-functional Agile teams, and I hold accessibility to WCAG 2.1 Level AA as a floor, not a stretch goal. I run the workshops, I write the research plan, I facilitate the sessions, I synthesise the findings, and then I build the component library.

Now

Principal Service / UX / UI Consultant

Elysium Digital · Sydney

Education

MA Information Science, Comenius University

BA (Hons) Digital Design & Animation, University of West London

Languages

Slovak (native) · Czech · English · German (basic)

Core strengths

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Tools

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← All work

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Role

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Team

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Methods

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Ask me about this

01 — The problem

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02 — Research

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Woolworths Gift Cards cart page

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Before / after

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Current — live RecordSearch
Live RecordSearch basic search page

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Proposed — my wireframe
Redesigned RecordSearch home page wireframe

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03 — Design

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Search results, grid view
Woolworths Gift Cards order page on mobile

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04 — Outcome

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Deliverables

Artefacts from the engagement

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Next case study

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Contact

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Sydney, Australia · Open to contract and permanent roles