Simona Pau
Lead Product & Service DesignerI build design decisions on evidence, not instinct.
I work across product, service and experience design, usually on systems too complex to fix with a nicer interface.
About
My background is rooted in psychology and research. I started in neuromarketing, studying how people perceive, decide, and react, and moved from there into UX, service design, and product.
How I work
I design products and services that have to work across organisations, operations, and the people using them every day. A polished interface matters, but it rarely solves the underlying problem on its own. Most of the real work happens before that, in figuring out what the problem actually is: a support directory that turns out to be a governance problem, a corporate website that turns out to be a positioning problem.
I work closely with engineering throughout a project, not just at handoff. I've debugged alongside developers and queried databases to understand what was actually happening, because staying involved until the build matches the intent is part of the job.
What I try to leave behind isn't just an interface. It's something that helps a team keep making good decisions later on: a governance framework, a documented system, a process that holds up without me in the room.
Work
Selected case studies
A support directory that had grown for years without logic, rebuilt around how people actually ask for help.
A product catalogue turned into something that finally sounded like the company behind it.
A technical enclosure reframed into a phygital service, built together with engineers and now heading into user co-design.
Additional work
A few more projects, shown briefly rather than in full depth.
Regional healthcare platform
Desktop portal for pharmacy and store staff to manage territorial health services, delivered with a team spanning two development squads and a DBA.
EU rural development portal
Comparative analysis of three fragmented rural-development portals for the European Union, feeding into a plan for a single, unified community platform.
University portal redesign
Full research-led redesign, from stakeholder mapping and card sorting to a desktop and mobile prototype.
Banking app
Mobile app design for an Italian bank, delivered in agile sprints within a small UX/UI team.
Insurance app
Mobile app for an insurance broker to manage policies and open accident claims, grounded in usability testing on the existing product.
Experience
Leading experience design across digital and phygital service ecosystems for enterprise clients across sectors including energy. Defining service architecture from framing through to delivery, aligning stakeholders across design, engineering, and client teams. Mentoring designers.
Led design on public-sector platforms for a regional healthcare authority and a national government ministry, with accessibility (AGID, WCAG) as a constant. Managed and mentored the design team, and worked with development through testing, debugging, and implementation alignment.
End-to-end design across national and international public-sector projects, including the European Union, a national university, and social security institutions. User research through surveys, interviews, and co-design workshops.
Research-driven design at an evidence-based consultancy: usability testing, user interviews, and heuristic evaluations feeding directly into UX/UI work for clients including an insurance-tech group and a major telecom operator. The place where grounding every design decision in observed behaviour became a working habit, not a principle.
UI design for a major Italian bank's mobile app, delivered in agile sprints within a small UX/UI team. Worked inside strict brand and compliance constraints, turning dense banking flows into clean, consistent interfaces and staying aligned with development sprint by sprint.
Earlier experience
Banking consultancy alongside an internal workflow UX initiative.
Qualitative and quantitative research, UX for the company website redesign.
Behavioural research with EEG, eye-tracking, and galvanic skin response.
Foundations
Where the evidence-first approach comes from: psychology and research before design.
Tools
Get in touch
I love talking about design, research, and complex systems. If something here sparked your curiosity, write me. I'd genuinely like to hear from you.