Designing digital products with a maker's eye.

I'm Michael Papanikolaou, a product designer in Sydney working across UX/UI, research and design systems. I trained in industrial design and exhibited furniture in Milan before moving into digital in 2017. Today I design payments, SaaS and e-commerce products.

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About

Same eye. Different material.

Portrait of Michael Papanikolaou.

I work across the whole product: understanding the problem, shaping the flows, designing the interface and staying close through build and QA. For nine years I've done that for fintech, B2B SaaS and e-commerce teams, including Live Payments, Taper, Hello Molly, Bed Threads, BWS and Dan Murphy's.

I started in industrial design, and at 23 I exhibited furniture at Milan Design Week. Designing for manufacture taught me to think in systems, respect constraints and test ideas early with real people. I still work that way, just on screen.

Outside work I paint non-objective abstracts, hike, salsa dance most nights and walk the coast with Carmelo, my King Charles cavalier.

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Start with the real problem

A brief is a starting point. First I find out what people are trying to do, and where they get stuck.

Think in systems

Furniture taught me to design parts that work together. Now it's components, tokens and flows.

Sweat the details

States, edge cases, spacing, words. The small things are what people feel when they use a product.

Make it count

AOV up $128 at Bed Threads. Profile completion up 15% at Hello Molly. The work should move something.

What I do

Digital products, shaped by making things.

Product design is the day job. Furniture is where I learned to design. Painting keeps me experimenting.

Product design example: Taper Design 2.0 garment visualiser.

Product design (UX/UI)

Research, flows, interaction, UI and design systems, through to developer hand-off and QA. I've designed payments platforms, B2B SaaS tools, native apps and e-commerce journeys. It's the day job, and where most of my work lives.

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Furniture design example: Slim Line water jug.

Furniture & objects

Five pieces from my industrial design years: Bea, Éxi, Melo, Zee and Slim Line. Melo was exhibited at Milan Design Week when I was 23. It's an earlier chapter, but it's where I learned to design for how things are made and used.

See the furniture work
Personal art: non-objective abstract painting.

Art

Non-objective abstract painting. A personal practice with no brief and no user, which is exactly why it helps. It sharpens my sense of colour, composition and knowing when to stop.

See the paintings

Working on something interesting?

I'm always happy to talk about interesting projects and opportunities. If the problem is meaty and the team is kind, I'd love to hear about it.

Send me an email

Thanks for stopping by.