Daniel Tshoane — Product Designer

Intro

Fifteen years in all things digital, the last five as a product designer for teams in South Africa and the United States. I take complex problems — insurance, banking, asset management — and turn them into products people can actually use.

Fifteen years. One obsession. Making tech make sense.

Select work

iWyze (Old Mutual) · South Africa · 2026 — Present

Emergency Assist & Financial Management

A roadside-emergency flow that gets a stranded driver from tap to tracked help in under 60 seconds — plus a unified financial view of premiums, payments and banking across the same policy.

01 / 06

Earlier work

2017

EFC — Extreme Fighting Championship

Fight-night web experience for Africa’s MMA promotion

2014 — 2017

Druff Interactive

Agency sites and campaign microsites, concept to front-end

2014

Nando’s — Fireball Invitational

Golf-day event microsite

Trusted by

What I do

Every skill in my aura

Product & UX

Turning ambiguous problems into clear, structured interfaces. Full lifecycle — information architecture, user flows and journey mapping, interaction design, wireframing and prototyping — always optimising for the people who actually use the thing.

End-to-end product designInformation architectureUser flowsInteraction designPrototyping

Design Systems

The infrastructure that makes good design repeatable. Semantic token architectures, multi-brand theming, component specification and developer handover — the boring-sounding work that quietly saves thousands of hours.

Design tokensMulti-brand themingComponent specificationWCAG 2.2Developer handover

Research & Validation

Decisions backed by evidence, not gut feel. User research, usability testing, heuristic evaluation and competitive benchmarking, synthesised into structures teams can act on.

User researchUsability testingHeuristic evaluationCompetitive benchmarkingStakeholder alignment

AI-Enhanced Workflows

AI where it actually helps, not where it sounds impressive. Agentic workflows, prompt engineering, AI-generated test data that makes prototypes testable before code — humans stay in the loop, decisions stay grounded.

Agentic workflowsPrompt engineeringVibe codingClaude CodeLovable AIFigma MCP

Interface Direction

Visual direction for products that need a distinct, consistent presence — typography, motion, imagery and UI detail shaped into interfaces that feel cohesive and memorable.

Visual directionTypographyMotionUI detail

Front-end Literacy

Former front-end developer. Still writes HTML, CSS and JavaScript, designs to real states and real breakpoints, and specs the eight states engineers actually have to build.

HTML/CSS/JSEight-state specsReal breakpointsDesign-to-code handoff

People I've worked with

Daniel doesn’t just design screens — he thinks in systems. Hand him a complex problem and he’ll come back with the flow, the edge cases and a prototype before most people finish their brief.”
Francis MangaDigital Design Lead — Retro Rabbit & Gold Media Lab

What sets Daniel apart is how fast he moves without cutting corners. He brings the same rigour to a wireframe as he does to a production handoff — and the developers notice.”
Wessel OlivierProduct Design Lead — Retro Rabbit

I was losing stock every weekend and had no way to prove it. Daniel built me an entire POS system in two weeks — now I can see every sale, every bottle, every rand from my phone.”
Tony DubeClub Owner — MaliPOS Client

How I think

Research, ideation, prototype, testing — then make it yours.

Clarify

Dig past the brief until the real problem shows — the one people feel.

Structure

Map every path and every state, so no one ever reaches a dead end.

Decide

Bring evidence to the table, so the team commits on facts, not opinions.

Build

Spec it like the developer I used to be — every state, ready to ship.

The honest differentiator: I work ahead of the requirements — interpreting intent from stakeholder sessions, researching the domain when nobody supplies it, and co-authoring feature logic with engineers rather than waiting to be handed a brief.

What I'm looking for

The right fit matters

Impact over output

I want the work to matter. Teams where design decisions are driven by real problems and measured by outcomes, not pixel volume.

Real collaboration

Cross-functional partnership where design, engineering and product work as equals. Not handoffs, conversations.

Complex problem spaces

I thrive in ambiguity. Insurance, banking, enterprise asset management — the harder the problem, the more interesting the design work.

Design maturity

Organisations that understand design as strategy, not decoration. A seat at the table, not a step in the pipeline.

Human-first culture

Teams that value empathy internally, not just in their products. Where trust and psychological safety aren’t slogans.

Beyond the portfolio

Discipline is the design practice.

Meditation

The day starts at 3:30

Shower, meditation, breath work before the first problem. A thirty-minute sit at night to review the day. The clarity in the work starts here.

Daniel's character meditating cross-legged on a Mars plateau at dawn

Contact

Let's
connect

daniel.tshoane88@gmail.com

Catch a shooting star up there and you get a wish — may I suggest working together?

Daniel Tshoane — Product Designer, Pretoria, South Africa