field notes
MADE BY FELIX  •  MADE BY FELIX  •  

Hi, I’m Felix 👋

I design checkout flows
& ship them in production.

Senior product designer for 15 years across AKQA, Huge and Citi. I design and build revenue-critical flows end to end.

Taking on 1–2 engagements per quarter — contract or fractional, US & UK. GMT, full morning overlap with EST.

felixhornoiu@gmail.com
First-time checkout (UK) with card and PayPal
01 — First-time checkout
Recurring purchase paying with a different card
02 — Recurring payment
Guest checkout into registration
03 — Guest checkout
Multiple payment methods architecture
04 — Payment methods
Rebuilt checkout across 7 European markets — one design system, one codebase, measurably fewer abandoned carts

Vision Direct scales a design system across seven countries without breaking checkout

Vision Direct is one of Europe’s biggest contact-lens retailers, part of EssilorLuxottica. I reworked the high-frequency checkout and account flows, then scaled the UK system across seven markets.

The brief was a tightrope: cut friction on a recurring medical purchase and lift conversion without breaking a platform that makes real revenue every hour — so every change shipped incrementally, inside the existing system.

Payments, subscriptions, address management, autosave, prescription entry, a rebuilt cross-brand colour system, localised for the UK, Italy, Spain, France, Ireland and the Netherlands.

UX / UIDesign SystemLocalisation
Keeps app splash screen — a new way to connect with the sports you love
01 — App splash
Scalable component templates
02 — Component system
NDA — Locked
Option purchase flow
03 — Option purchase flow
NDA — Locked
04 — Secondary market calculator
NDA — Locked
Fintech onboarding under NDA — designing trust into the first five minutes of a money product

Keeps. UX and a scalable design system for a sport-investment platform.

Keeps lets people buy, trade and cash out stakes in sport the way you would shares — alongside a secondary market where match tickets trade as options instead of fixed seats.

My role was a hybrid: UX across the whole platform working alongside the branding team, then taking their designs into a scalable, tokenised design system for part two.

UXDesign SystemFintech
Perfect Play — app overview board
01 — Perfect Play
Training plan interaction
02 — Training plan
03 — AR gate setup game
Activity swiping interaction
04 — Activity interactions
Consumer training app built with Chelsea FC's academy coaches — activity templating, AR setups and adaptive training plans

Perfect Play. Chelsea FC’s academy training method, redesigned as a consumer app.

Perfect Play translates academy-level training from Chelsea’s elite coaches and sports psychologists into a personalised app — 75+ activities, each with 3–6 levels, adapting to the player’s age and skill.

I worked as Product Designer across UX, systems design and prototyping — leading activity templating, onboarding, AR interactions and the performance mechanics behind adaptive training plans.

Ordo Pay — app overview
01 — Ordo Pay
Payment flow interaction
02 — Payment flow
Extension request interaction
03 — Extension request
Send request — four steps
04 — Send request steps
Open Banking payment requests — dual-sided UX for small businesses and household users, under strict financial regulations

Ordo Pay. A payment-request service for the Open Banking era.

Ordo Pay lets small business owners — boiler engineers, cleaners, gardeners — send payment requests over the UK Open Banking API, while household users pay, part-pay or ask for an extension from one unified feed.

I led research and product design across the dual-sided experience — end-to-end flows from registration to requests, part-payments and dashboards, validated through Flinto prototypes and user testing.

01 — Trade flow
02 — Compare stocks
03 — X-ray portfolio
04 — Portfolio builder
Enterprise fintech at scale — design systems work inside one of the world's largest banks

Citi’s banking app learns to trade

Citi spun up a team to layer stocks, crypto, portfolios and advice onto its existing banking app. I was one of three product designers — flows, UI, interactive prototypes, testing, the lot.

The tricky part: it had to feel native to Citi’s existing app and taxonomy while serving three very different personas across a basic and an advanced mode, every section customisable.

Agile, fully remote, eight of us. We moved off Sketch onto Figma, prototyped in ProtoPie, user-tested every two weeks. Some screens stay blurred — NDA.

UX / UIPrototypingDesign System
01 — Prototype demo
02 — Registration flow
03 — Intro / first run
04 — Card reveal
Earlier: subscription commerce for a global entertainment brand

Warner Bros. asked for one app to hold the whole Wizarding World — from lifelong fans to first-timers

Instead of one feed for everyone, the app breaks the universe into bite-size cards and packs that reshape themselves per audience — devoted fans get depth, first-timers and under-13s get the on-ramp.

I ran research across those audience groups, built the component system that had to hold all of it, prototyped the “magical” micro-interactions, and tested seven rounds deep before handing anything to build.

UX ResearchDesign SystemMotion
01 — Final designs
Basket integration
02 — Basket integration
Choose a workshop
03 — Choose a workshop
04 — Visual design
E-commerce at parts-catalogue scale

Euro Car Parts. Fit it for me — turning a parts basket into a booked fitting slot.

No separate product, no new app — the fitting service rides the existing basket flow: add fitting, get an instant quote, pick an approved workshop nearby, book the slot. You still only pay online for the parts.

Three months with Big Light: research and competitor teardown, flow mapping with the tech team, wireframing the happy path and the annoying edge cases (postcode gates, VRM lookups, compulsory-vs-optional parts), then Principle prototypes tested on real car owners before visual design.

UX ResearchPrototypingVisual Design
Selected work shown · more on request

Full portfolio available on request.

Request full folio →
Capabilities

One person, four disciplines: UX, UI, motion, frontend. The handoff problem, deleted.

01

UX for complex systems

Booking platforms and transactional products made to feel simple. I work close to the dev backend and translate what it can do into flows people actually want to use — and convert on.

Booking platformsComplex systemsUser flowsBackend-awareConversion
02

Design systems that scale

Tokenised, scalable design systems in Figma — components and variables structured to flex across brands, markets and platforms without breaking, with docs the whole org can adopt.

TokensComponentsFigmaMulti-marketScalable
03

Motion & interaction

Advanced interactions — drag-and-drop, multi-touch gestures and micro-motion. Lottie out of After Effects via Bodymovin, and high-fidelity prototypes in Framer, ProtoPie and Principle. Also dabble in 3D design in 3D space, building scenes and object interactions for product surfaces.

LottieBodymovinAfter EffectsFramerProtoPiePrincipleSplineFusion 360
04

Research that decides

Quantitative and qualitative testing that backs decisions with evidence — guerrilla sessions, interviews and remote testing — so the right calls get made for the right reasons, not the loudest.

Qual + QuantUser testingData-backedDiscovery
05

Design to code

I don't hand off and walk away — I code my own designs and work hand in hand with developers to get things shipped. A/B testing to validate what wins, front-of-the-front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) to build it, and living component libraries in Storybook so design and code stay one source of truth.

A/B testingHTML / CSS / JSStorybookDev handoffComponent libraries
01 Method

The short version

01

Useful beats clever

The job is to work, not to be admired at a portfolio review. If it doesn’t help, it’s cut.

02

No lying to users

The screen says what the system actually does, full stop. No dark patterns, no fake countdown timers.

03

Less, on purpose

Fewer flows, fewer states, fewer things to decide. Restraint is the actual skill here, not the add-ons.

04

The details are the job

Spacing, motion, copy, focus order. Nobody notices these when they’re right — everyone notices when they’re wrong.

05

Built to survive the next redesign

Systems over one-off screens, so the work still holds up two rebrands later.

06

Quiet, on purpose

Good design doesn’t ask for applause. It gets out of the way and lets people finish what they came to do.

07

AI does the typing, I do the judging

Faster iterations, same standards.

02 Capabilities & Track Record

What's under the hood

  • Product & interaction design CORE
  • Design systems & tokens CORE
  • UX research & testing APPLIED
  • Prototyping & motion FIGMA / CODE
  • Front-of-the-front-end HTML / CSS
  • Brand & visual identity EXT
  • EssilorLuxotticaVision Direct
    2023–2025
  • AKQAUX · Interaction
    Toyota · H&M
  • Citi · W12Product
    Design
  • HugeWizarding World
    Interaction
  • BeameryLead Product
    Design
03 Field Notes

Notes from the field

Working notes. Experiments, prototypes and dead ends from live projects — including how I use AI in the build.

Jul 28, 2025 · 3D · Prototyping

My 3D neon lights + Spline prototyping app, reviewed

3D-printing replicas of old industrial neon lamps led to a bigger question: could a real product-page configurator be prototyped in actual 3D? A hands-on test of Spline, the browser-based 3D prototyping tool.

Jul 26, 2023 · AI · Concept

Designing the Midjourney app that doesn’t exist yet

Midjourney still runs entirely inside Discord. A thought experiment in Protopie: what a dedicated app could look like, with breadcrumb navigation, long-press semantic selection, and drag-to-blend instead of slash commands.

Jun 08, 2023 · AR · Perfect Play

Placing large 3D objects in AR

How we handled a tricky AR problem on Perfect Play: most toolkits assume you're placing something pocket-sized, so getting a 5m+ object to sit convincingly on a real football pitch needed its own approach to scanning and placement.

06 Clients

Who’s paid for this so far

Warner Bros., Google, Facebook, H&M, The Economist, EY, Microsoft, Coop, RAC and Vision Direct, alongside sharper-edged startups like Perfect Play, Beamery, Handshake (US), Peerpoint, Leakbot and Ordo Pay.

H&M
Warner Bros.
Chelsea FC
The Economist
BASF
Coop
Google
Facebook
AKQA
HUGE
EY
TATA
RAC
Citi
Microsoft
Wizarding World
Toyota
Luxottica
Hublot
07 Reel

Proof it’s not just static comps

Prototypes, interactions and the tiny details, pulled from years of shipped work. They start playing as you scroll — no clicking required.

08 Off duty

About me

I love Coffee, Chess, Gym Training, Cooking good food, Investing & Architecture

Got something that needs
thinkering?

Taking on 1–2 engagements per quarter — contract or fractional, US & UK. From research and prototyping through to shipped, revenue-critical UI. GMT, full morning overlap with EST.

Contact
DesignerFelix Hornoiu
DisciplineUX · UI · Product Consultancy
BasedLondon, UK
TimezoneGMT / UTC+0
Status Open