Portfolio · Cape Town, South Africa

LizChuene

I design for the moment people are about to give up.

Four products, one problem: the distance between wanting something and keeping it up. My work starts with the research that finds where people quit — the fourth day, the thirty-first minute on hold, the month that ends before the money does — and finishes with the screen that catches them there.

See the work
DAY FOUR WHERE THE DESIGN HAS TO WORK DAY THIRTY
InstallRetention, any wellness appDay 30
Discipline
UX research, UI design, prototyping
Based
Cape Town, South Africa
Toolkit
Figma, Miro, Jira, Confluence, Notion

Selected work — 04 case studies

Each one starts with somebody quitting

01

HealthyHabitsWellness & wellbeing tracker · Mobile

A tracker built to survive a bad week — one screen, one tap per habit, and progress shown as a pattern instead of a verdict.

UX researchUI designPrototype
02

PennySavvyStudent savings & budgeting · Mobile

58 students surveyed, 8 in 10 with no savings account. A budgeting app for people whose money runs out before the month does.

Survey · 58PersonasIAHi-fi
03

Cool Kind Co.AI-assisted customer support · Web

A help centre for people who have already been on hold for half an hour: self-service first, an AI assistant second, a human when it matters.

Affinity mappingFlowsResponsive UI
04

LuxxStaysHotel booking platform · Web

Four months, moderated usability testing and a three-stage affinity board turned into a booking flow that answers the question before it's asked.

Usability testingJourney mapHi-fi prototype

The through-line

One question,
four times

Every project below started somewhere specific: a moment in the research where a real person described the point at which they stopped.

I've stopped treating that as a motivation problem. People don't abandon a savings app because they've stopped caring about money — they abandon it because the app asked for more effort than the thing it was supposed to make easier. Find the exact moment, design for that, and the rest of the product mostly follows.

01

Day four

The week gets disrupted, two logs are missed, and the incomplete data reads as failure. HealthyHabits answers with milestones small enough to hit on a bad day.

02

Month end

The allowance is gone and the budget was never written down. PennySavvy answers with a lock, a calculator and a goal you can see moving.

03

Minute thirty-one

Still on hold, repeating the same issue to a third agent. Cool Kind Co. answers by making the account fixable without the call.

04

The fifth photo

There are only five images, no room size, no reviews — nothing left to decide with. LuxxStays answers by putting the evidence on the page.

04End-to-end
case studies
58Students surveyed
for PennySavvy
24Weeks on the
longest project
12Support quotes
sorted into 4 themes

Try it — how a brief actually gets written

Twelve complaints,
four decisions

This is the raw material from the Cool Kind Co. support research — verbatim, unsorted, the way it comes out of interviews. Affinity mapping is the step where noise becomes a design brief. Press the button and watch it happen — or drag the notes into groups yourself.

12 raw quotes from support interviews — unsorted Drag a note onto a group
“I've waited over 30 minutes just to speak to someone.”
“I keep getting locked out of my account with no clear reason.”
“I got charged twice and no one is fixing it.”
“I can't solve basic issues like password resets on my own.”
“I have to repeat my issue every time I call back.”
“My payment failed but I wasn't told why.”
“There's no chatbot or virtual help for quick answers.”
“The password reset link doesn't work or takes too long to arrive.”
“Sometimes I get disconnected and have to start over.”
“There's no status update on my reported issues online.”
“The system keeps rejecting my valid card.”
“The app logs me out frequently and makes me re-enter everything.”
Lack of self-service 00
Call centre 00
Payment failures 00
Login issues 00

Those four groups became the four things the Cool Kind Co. help centre had to do: solve it yourself, don't repeat yourself, explain the money, get back in. See what got built →

How I work

Four phases, in order

Each one produces something the next phase needs. If an artefact doesn't answer a question that's blocking a decision, I don't make it.

1

Listen

  • Interviews & surveys
  • Competitive audit
  • Affinity mapping
  • Personas & empathy maps
2

Frame

  • Problem statement
  • Journey mapping
  • Opportunity areas
  • Information architecture
3

Draw

  • Storyboards & sketches
  • Task flows
  • Lo-fi wireframes
  • Medium and high fidelity
4

Prove

  • Usability testing
  • Think-aloud sessions
  • Cognitive walkthrough
  • Synthesis & iteration

Writing — published on UXmatters

Designing for the people products leave out

Outside the case studies, I write about the people banking and payments forget: the ones on feature phones, shared devices and patchy signal, and what it takes to design for them.

Essay 01 · UXmatters

Creating inclusive banking experiences for digitally marginalised people

Human-centered design is only as human as the variety of life it represents.

Four principles it argues for

  • Design for feature phones too: USSD and SMS, light on data, usable offline.
  • Research with communities, not about them, with consent that works for people who read with difficulty.
  • Put trust before speed: plain terms, information in small steps, community ambassadors.
  • Speak the local language, with familiar analogies and voice in the vernacular.
Read the essay on UXmatters (opens in a new tab)
Essay 02 · UXmatters

Designing smarter payment ecosystems with AI and UX strategy in emerging markets

In emerging countries, confidence serves as the fundamental currency of growth.

What it argues

  • Payments are national infrastructure now (UPI, M-Pesa, Mukuru), so the race moves from adoption to keeping people.
  • Predictive AI can spot fraud and personalise, but only if it explains itself with empathy.
  • Invisible systems earn trust through clear statuses, a calm tone and local design.
  • Ethical data and human support are advantages, not costs.
Read the essay on UXmatters (opens in a new tab)

About

Hello — I'm Liz

A UX/UI designer who starts with what people say and finishes with the screen that keeps them going.

I like a problem written down before it's drawn, decisions that can be traced back to something a person actually said, and screens that stay calm when the person using them isn't.

To me research is part of design, not a phase that comes before it. Outside of that: bagels, podcasts about interfaces, and a long-running argument with myself about whether dark patterns are a design problem or a business one.

Capabilities

  • User research & interviewing
  • Surveys and quantitative synthesis
  • Affinity diagrams
  • Personas & empathy maps
  • Customer journey mapping
  • Information architecture
  • User flows & task flows
  • Wireframing, lo-fi to hi-fi
  • Prototyping & usability testing
  • Accessibility review

Tools

  • Figma — design, prototyping, handoff
  • Miro — affinity boards, workshops
  • Jira & Confluence — delivery
  • Notion — research repository
  • Google Forms — survey instruments