ANZ: anz.com and the Horizon design system
Transforming anz.com and helping establish Horizon, ANZ’s first enterprise-wide brand and design system.
- Role
- Design Lead, Brand & Design System
- Timeframe
- 2017 to 2022
- Contribution
- Strategy, research, and design systems
From hands-on design to team leadership
I joined ANZ as a Senior Experience Designer on anz.com. I established myself as a craft and design leader, then grew into leading the designers working on the website. My remit included major redesigns and replatforming work in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), working closely with the Global Head of Brand and Chief Marketing Officer.
Making the website work better for customers
I helped fundamentally change how anz.com looked and worked. We improved usability, accessibility, information architecture, and navigation so customers could find and understand the information they needed. This work supported sales through the website while balancing business priorities with customer needs. I combined qualitative usability studies with quantitative analysis of behaviour and interactions. That gave the team a clearer basis for deciding what to change and where to focus our effort.
Establishing the Living Style Guide
I established the Living Style Guide with designers, engineers, and content colleagues. This localised design system supported the AEM-based dot-com website, giving content teams a more consistent way to write and designers a shared palette to work from. It also brought design and content closer together around reusable patterns and shared standards.
Taking systems thinking across the bank
I became design lead for Horizon, ANZ’s first enterprise-wide brand and design system, within the initiative led by Michelle Spencer. We designed it to work across platforms and frameworks, with theming supported by design tokens. The scope extended across internal tools and customer experiences, including banker experiences, internet banking, apps, corporate banking, and private banking. The challenge was to create shared foundations that could serve those different needs.
Establishing a shared creative direction
The team and I developed concepts across business banking, internet banking, and the mobile app to establish a consistent creative direction. I worked to bring teams across the bank around that direction, using the concepts to show how a shared visual language could work across different customer experiences. Our Horizon team worked closely with CMO Sweta Mehra, CDO Opher Yom-Tov, and other senior digital leaders to connect the direction with the bank’s broader ambitions.
Starting with the people who would use it
We began by meeting face to face with about 70 people across the organisation. We explored their needs, pain points, understanding of design systems, and willingness to contribute. Synthesising that research into themes informed our working principles and implementation approach. It also brought people into the initiative from the start.
Giving Horizon a personality
Some teams were resistant to Horizon, so we worked on how the system was introduced and perceived. Horaz, our team mascot, gave it an approachable internal identity alongside the research, conversations, and contribution process.
Making contribution part of the system
Delivery teams contributed designs grounded in real product work. Horizon helped review standards, refine components, and bring them into the library and documentation. Open design studies used structured critique to gather perspectives across the bank, test whether patterns could serve different teams, and maintain community buy-in. This was a collaborative effort across design, engineering, content, brand, and design operations. The core team helped facilitate the work rather than making every decision in isolation.
Showing value to different audiences
We used community surveys to understand the efficiencies teams reported from using Horizon. Those findings informed the return-on-investment work led by our initiative lead and helped demonstrate practical value to other teams. We tailored the story to the audience: investment and productivity for executives, useful reusable assets and workflow improvements for practitioners.
Results
70% faster work, based on the 2021 ANZ Horizon User Survey. This gave us evidence of the efficiencies people experienced using the system and helped us build the case for wider adoption. Our broader “50–70% faster” message combined a 50% industry benchmark with the 70% finding from our own survey. The Horizon figure was survey-based, rather than a measured reduction in delivery time. Alongside those efficiencies, ongoing design studies gave teams a voice in the system and helped us test components against needs across the bank.