About AJ Bell.
AJ Bell is one of the UK’s largest investment platforms, serving over 700,000 customers across ISAs, SIPPs, Lifetime ISAs and dealing accounts.
I joined as Senior Content Designer through Hedgehog Lab, embedded within the product team building AJ Bell’s mobile app, an FCA-regulated financial product subject to Consumer Duty requirements.
Writing for money, where every word carries weight.
Financial services copy operates under constraints most digital products don’t face. Every claim needs to be accurate, every eligibility rule verified, every piece of jargon either removed or explained. Working across six transfer flows, watchlists, price alerts, documents and product discovery screens, as well as onboarding across ISA and SIPP applications, I was responsible for making complex regulated content feel plain, warm and human without compromising accuracy or compliance.
The brand promise was Feel Good investing. That meant copy that was calm and confident rather than alarming, conversational rather than corporate, and always on the customer’s side, even when delivering difficult information like eligibility restrictions or transfer delays.
From question headings to plain labels.
One of the most consistent issues across the app was question headings. Screens were asking “What is your date of birth?” or “How do you describe your gender?” instead of simply naming the screen. This pattern appeared across every flow — transfers, onboarding, watchlists — and created friction at the exact moment customers needed to orient quickly.
Working through every screen systematically, I replaced question headings with plain declarative labels and established H1 rules for mobile that every designer and writer on the project could follow. 1 to 5 words, sentence case, no punctuation, one per screen. Simple rules that made a significant difference to how the app felt.
I also established a completion screen pattern that ran throughout the whole app. “Good move.” for positive actions — transferring, adding money, setting an alert — and “Great.” for neutral ones like selling or withdrawing. The full stop on both is intentional. It gives the moment weight and finality. A small decision, but one that gave the app a consistent emotional register at every key moment.
Checking the claims before they reach customers.
On a regulated financial product, copy that sounds right needs to be triple-checked. I checked financial and eligibility claims against HMRC guidance and the FCA’s Consumer Duty requirements and worked directly with AJ Bell’s transfers and product teams to confirm timescales, rules and what each feature does before describing it to customers.
I took part in compliance walkthroughs of the transfer flows and kept a running list of open questions for sign-off, so anything unconfirmed stayed visible instead of being assumed. The aim throughout was for customers to rely on accurate, plain, evidence-backed information.
Testing comprehension, not just preference.
I designed and ran four rounds of unmoderated comprehension testing on User Testing across 100 participants, with an 80% pass threshold on every comprehension question.
The SIPP transfer flow scored 4.28 out of 5 for clarity. The Lifetime ISA to Lifetime ISA flow scored 4.6. Both results were strong, but testing also surfaced specific failures that scores alone wouldn’t have caught. A label change from “Cash-only” to “Investments sold first” came directly from a 56% comprehension failure on the S&S ISA to Lifetime ISA spot test. We identified and fixed four comprehension failures within the same sprint. The new labels all tested above the threshold immediately.
I also ran an A/B comprehension test on unit class copy; one of the most consistently failing moments across two test rounds. The original copy used “unit class” and “rebates”— terms that failed comprehension testing twice despite being legally accurate. The plain language rewrite replaced them with “version of a fund” and “any difference owed to you.” It scored 95% versus 90% on two of three comprehension questions. I presented the results to compliance with supporting evidence to make the case for the plain-language version, an example of content design influencing a compliance decision through evidence rather than opinion.
Content design at a systems level.
The project's most significant output wasn’t any individual screen; it was the systems built around the work. I contributed to a product-wide standardisation meeting on toasts, pagination and filtering, bringing NNG research and WCAG considerations to align product, design and engineering on copy standards that would apply across the whole app, not just the flows I was working on.
I built a content design system from the ground up, documenting H1 rules, error-state patterns, toast conventions, navigation patterns, and terminology decisions. I contributed standalone sections to the team’s Confluence knowledge base, including toast and notification patterns and end-of-list copy standards.
I wrote the content design system so any writer, designer, or new team member could pick it up and use it without having to re-establish anything. That was the point: to make the work durable, not dependent on one person.