Mario CardosoProject Overview
TransUnion South Africa was part of a broader effort to bring global consumer systems into a shared cloud platform. The initiative was already underway when I joined. My mandate was to establish the research direction, define a modular UX architecture and create a roadmap that could respond to South African customer needs while supporting a more integrated global product strategy.
The portal served a market with more than 27 million credit-active consumers and needed to make credit information meaningful across varied financial circumstances. The work became my first opportunity to lead a truly global team across the United States, Canada and South Africa.
My Role and Leadership Scope
I managed a designer in the United States and a researcher in Canada, both direct reports, and partnered closely with a product owner in South Africa. I defined the research questions, experience architecture and modularity strategy. The researcher planned and conducted the study and produced the detailed report. The designer developed the visual components and interaction patterns within the direction I established.
Regional and global leaders participated in major decisions. I made the case that platform integration should include the design layer: one component system, shared UX practices and a repeatable research process. I also created the experience roadmap and used research evidence to influence which audiences and capabilities should be prioritized.
The Problem
The programme's technical direction was clear: global systems would move under a shared cloud umbrella. The experience direction was less resolved. Without a common UX architecture, regional products could reproduce the fragmentation of the legacy environment inside a new technical platform.
The South African market also contained a broad range of customer needs. An experience designed for a generic credit consumer would provide limited guidance and make prioritization difficult. The team needed to understand which audiences should shape the initial product and how the portal could connect score information with meaningful next steps.
The challenge combined regional specificity with global reuse. The product had to reflect local language, financial behaviour and expectations, while the design system and platform model needed enough modularity to support future regions and capabilities.
Strategic Response
Make research the basis for product scope
I framed the research programme around customer context, credit behaviours, comprehension and desired support. The goal was to identify meaningful audience patterns and use them to choose the initial product emphasis. This gave the team a stronger basis for prioritization than a broad list of possible features.
Design for modularity
I defined an architecture in which score interpretation, recommendations, education and account capabilities could be assembled from reusable modules. The model allowed the South African experience to express local priorities while remaining compatible with a shared platform.
Integrate design practices with the cloud programme
I positioned the design system as part of platform integration. Shared components, interaction rules and contribution practices could reduce duplication and help regional teams benefit from one another's work. The roadmap connected those foundations to future research and release priorities.
Research and Key Insights
The researcher conducted remote sessions with participants matched to relevant consumer profiles. We began with five potential audience segments and used the findings to identify three groups that provided the strongest direction for the initial experience.
Three audiences clarified the product opportunity
The prioritized groups were the Early Career Professional, the Young Professional and the Hard-Working Busy Family. They represented different levels of credit confidence, financial pressure and readiness to act. The segments helped the team connect product priorities to recognizable customer circumstances.
Score labels needed to support action
Credit terminology could sound final or judgmental. We refined labels toward Room for Improvement, Needs Attention and Early Stages. The language created space for guidance and helped the interface frame a score as a condition customers could understand and respond to.
Recommendations required context
Customers needed to understand why an action mattered and how it related to their situation. That insight shaped a modular relationship between score status, explanation, recommended steps and educational content.
Key Decisions and Execution
The team explored three experience directions and evaluated them against the research themes and platform constraints. I guided the selection of the direction that best balanced clear score interpretation, actionable guidance and reusable modules.
I defined the overall experience architecture and roadmap. The designer translated that strategy into components and interface detail, while I reviewed the work for coherence, modularity and alignment with the research. The researcher supplied the evidence trail and helped ensure that decisions remained connected to participant behaviour.
The resulting system included reusable score treatments, recommendation modules, educational content patterns and account structures. These components created a foundation for the South African portal and a credible model for integrating future regional design work.
Outcomes and Impact
By the end of my involvement in 2023, the programme had a validated audience strategy, a selected experience direction, a modular UX architecture and a roadmap for continued delivery. Research had narrowed five potential segments to three priority audiences and had directly shaped language, hierarchy and recommendation patterns.
The work also established a more integrated way for the global team to operate. Research, design and regional product responsibilities were explicit, and the design-system proposal connected experience governance to the broader cloud-platform ambition.
I did not remain close enough to the programme after departure to verify launch scope or post-launch performance. The case therefore ends with the product direction and delivery foundation I directly led. It does not claim deployment, adoption or commercial outcomes that I cannot substantiate.
What This Changed
This was my first project leading a team distributed across three countries and balancing regional decision-making with global platform goals. It strengthened my approach to delegation: I set the research and architecture direction, while the researcher and designer owned the depth of their disciplines.
The case also clarified how I use UX strategy in platform programmes. Technical integration creates leverage when the experience layer has shared principles, reusable components and a roadmap grounded in customer evidence. My contribution was to connect those elements and give leadership a practical direction for the work that followed.
Evidence and Attribution
Market scale, audience definitions, research themes and roadmap outcomes come from project documentation and TransUnion market context available during the engagement. Post-launch deployment and performance are intentionally excluded because I could not verify them after leaving the programme.