Charmaine’s story

Charmaine is a product designer who found her home in some of the most complex corners of financial services and health tech. Over 8 years, she's built a reputation for untangling systems that are genuinely hard to use and making them feel like they were designed for real people all along.

She's worked across corporate banking platforms, cross-border payment apps, healthcare concierge experiences, and even Singapore's first live programmable digital currency pilot. Whether the problem is a fragmented enterprise platform or a security-critical user flow, she brings the same approach: understand the person on the other side first, then work backwards from there.

Off the clock, she's watching stand-up, catching the latest film, or deep in a video game. Which, if you think about it, are all just really good case studies in keeping people engaged.  

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Standout chapters

• Prudential. Designed the Guided Care concierge experience across Hong Kong and Indonesia, helping patients navigate personalised healthcare journeys through the messaging apps they already use daily ‍
• DBS Trade Finance. Brought together a fragmented suite of over 20 products from letters of credit to invoice financing into one coherent experience across IDEAL and Doc Trade ‍
• DBS x MAS (Project Orchid). Part of the small team that brought Singapore's first programmable digital SGD pilot to life, for a live collaboration between DBS, MAS, and GovTech ‍
• GlobeSend by DBS. Worked on security and compliance UX for a cross-border payment platform serving 110+ markets, keeping fraud prevention from getting in the way of the actual transaction ‍
• Standard Chartered. Improved FX deal booking and pricing on Straight2Bank, a wholesale banking platform used by corporate and institutional clients across 50+ markets

Favourite part of her job as an ice cream flavour  

Caramel and vanilla. There's a sweetness to work that keeps people at the centre of it, whether that's sitting with users, aligning with stakeholders, or collaborating with a team. You're constantly thinking about how people move through a journey, what their goals and fears are, and what makes them give up on a product entirely. That human side of the work never gets old.

On what keeps her curious

I enjoy constantly being surprised by human behaviour. We’re super unpredictable. You design something based on the best practices and expect people to use it a certain way then they completely prove you wrong. There is never one design that is perfect and would be a catch-all for the best user experience. Some of us like very detailed experiences, others very simple ones. As a designer, we constantly need to figure out what the best experience is within the limits of time, budget, client’s industry and skill level that you're at as a designer. That’s where the challenge lies and the fun begins.