“We want this to feel seamless … but we also need explicit consent, mandatory disclosures, manual checks, and legal disclaimers.”
Every seasoned designer recognises this paradox. Designing in the grey zone where intuitive user intent meets institutional paranoia; this is the real art of UX. It’s here, away from idealised personas and tidy journey maps, that experienced designers earn their keep.
There’s an invisible brief beneath every customer-focused requirement: a shadow brief shaped by compliance, legal, and operational anxieties. Good designers learn not just to sense this, but to actively probe it. Ignore it, and your project spirals into endless revisions, stakeholder reviews where the work is designed by committee, subtlety is lost; engage it early, and you gain clarity – and allies.
Take pattern fatigue. Users tire of repetitive consent modals, disclaimers, and (in most but not all cases) friction-heavy journeys. Businesses, meanwhile, cling anxiously to these same patterns as safeguards against imagined or real regulatory backlash. But real trust isn’t built through relentless checkbox rituals. It’s earned through clear, respectful experiences that make the necessary feel intentional, not a cover-your-arse afterthought.
Collaboration here isn’t confined to design reviews or user testing, it happens in office kitchen conversations, Teams/Slack channels, and impromptu chats. You learn to engage risk, legal, product, and ops stakeholders early and often, folding their concerns into the design narrative without allowing the process to be swallowed whole.
I don’t just write about this stuff. I’ve done it.
In regulated finance journeys, instead of burying disclosures or making them intrusive, my team always sought to reframe the moment as part of proactive user education, clear, transparent language turned obligatory checkboxes into moments of genuine value.
For an automotive e-commerce flow, this meant legal mandated conspicuously disruptive copy and impenetrable ‘maths stacks’. But by carefully segmenting the messaging and testing contextual placement, the caveats turned into trust-enhancing affirmations rather than flow-breaking interruptions, and those maths stacks became useful summaries of the (complex) product the customer was buying.
Other projects at Aviva and Standard Life involved compliance from day one, not as gatekeepers but co-designers. The result, I hoped users would see, was surprisingly intuitive UX – and a more collaborative approach next time around. Aligning regulatory demands early creates space for creativity rather than stifling it.
Early in my career, it’s fair to say I viewed legal and compliance as blockers (and they saw digital as suspiciously nebulous, much harder to sign off than print). Now, I see them simply as constraints: like network latency, budget, or screen size. And like those, they can be designed-for intelligently and creatively.
I always come back to something Jamie Fobert said about designing Tate St. Ives. Parts of the building were shaped around a core problem: how to get large-scale artworks in, move them through the space, and install them cleanly. Instead of fighting the constraint, they made it central to the solution. Form followed function, but with elegance. That, to me, is how I work with compliance now. Not a hurdle. Just part of the brief.
John Gibbard 