About me

John Gibbard is a UX Strategist and Digital Experience Lead with over 20 years' experience shaping complex digital products across automotive, financial services, eCommerce, retail and high-consideration customer journeys.

His work sits where user experience, commercial pressure and organisational complexity meet: regulated flows, multi-market platforms, direct-to-consumer sales, configurators, service ecosystems, finance journeys, customer portals and post-purchase experiences. In plain terms, he helps organisations turn ambiguity into architecture, that is making complex journeys clearer for customers and easier for senior teams to govern, scale and improve.

Most recently, John was Global UX Director at Accenture Song, leading UX strategy for Jaguar Land Rover's global digital ecosystem from 2017 to 2024. His work covered global web platforms, vehicle configurators, eCommerce, D2C retail strategy, ownership journeys, finance-related flows, product launches and customer retention experiences across Range Rover, Defender, Discovery and Jaguar. He led and mentored UX architects and researchers, working with strategy, design, engineering, CRO, research, marketing, product and market teams.

Before that, John was Head of Experience Planning at Dare, where he worked across clients including BMW, MINI, Nike Football, Aviva, Standard Life, Hakkasan and parkrun. Earlier still, he worked in-house at Aviva, designing customer-facing digital experiences in a regulated financial services environment.

More recently, John has worked on strategic CX and UX projects across premium home, retail and financial services contexts. This has included mapping the customer lifecycle for a heritage domestic appliance brand, helping clarify digital and service experience across inspiration, showroom, purchase, onboarding and ownership. He has also contributed to pitch and proposition work for major financial services, kitchen retail and automotive clients, shaping the experience strategy, customer journey logic and narrative structure behind new-business proposals. Where client confidentiality matters, the work is discussed through the decision problems, not the logo parade.
John's particular strength is upstream UX strategy: framing the problem before the organisation rushes into screens, features or the nearest fashionable acronym or tool. He is useful where the work involves multiple stakeholders, unclear ownership, fragmented journeys, compliance tension, commercial targets and customers being asked to make decisions they do not make every day. Vehicle finance. Insurance journeys. Kitchen planning. Premium appliance ownership. Multi-step onboarding. Service and support journeys. The bits of digital experience where clarity matters because the user is carrying risk, uncertainty or cost.

He works across research synthesis, journey mapping, service and product strategy, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, stakeholder workshops, UX governance and case-making for senior audiences. His outputs are usually the artefacts that help teams make better decisions: such as journey maps, blueprints, IA models, prototypes, principles, prioritisation frameworks and executive narratives.

John is design-led, but not theatre-led. His view of good UX is rooted in restraint, clarity and human behaviour. The best systems often recede a little; they give people enough structure to act with confidence without making them admire the interface every three seconds.

He is hands-on where it matters, using Figma for wireframes, prototypes and UX artefacts; Miro for mapping and synthesis; and Keynote or PowerPoint when the job is to make a complex argument resonate with senior stakeholders. He is not a pixel-perfect UI designer and does not pretend to be one. His value is in structure, judgement, narrative and the design of systems that other specialists can execute with confidence.
Alongside client and product work, John writes about UX, digital behaviour, culture, running and design. He also speaks to psychology students at the University of York about careers in UX, mentors emerging practitioners, volunteers at parkrun, and serves on the committee of his former school's alumni association.

He is based in Surrey and is open to freelance, contract, permanent or fractional roles where senior UX judgement is needed early enough to matter: complex journeys, regulated decision points, premium customer experiences, multi-market inconsistency, or digital transformation work that needs less theatre and more architecture.