PAUL ADAMS
Product Designer and User Researcher

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Complex systems fail when clarity breaks down. I design for clarity.

Based in Berlin, Germany, I'm a designer and researcher working with organisations internationally to translate complex ideas into clear, intuitive experiences with a focus on the design of impactful digital tools, products and services.
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I apply an evidence-led, people-focussed, structured approach to my design practice whilst keeping the process grounded and human, ensuring solutions are practical, purposeful and rewarding. My visual approach to system design connects whole teams with user needs, helping to ask the right questions at the right time and powering AI-prototyping and design system development.

Working with cross-functional teams at public and private-sector organisations, international institutions, start-ups and with entrepreneurs – I help to shape thoughtful, human centred solutions together.

I couple my systematic approach to solving hard problems with a passion for aesthetics, typography and accessibility.

I welcome the opportunity to discuss new collaborations, whether that's bringing clarity to an abstract problem space, shipping an early-stage concept to MVP or building on a solution that is already making a difference.

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Reading ‘Wanderlust’ by Rebecca Solnit
Listening to ‘Getting Killed’ by Geese

CV

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Employment Sonder Collective
Independent Product Designer & Researcher
2021 - Present

Pathways
Gates Foundation grant
User Researcher & Product Designer
2025

Partners In Health
Product Designer & User Researcher
2024 - 2025

OpenMRS
Design and User Research Lead
2024 - 2025

Open Concept Lab
Design and User Research Lead
2022 - 2024

University of California (San Francisco)
UX Design and User Research Lead
2022 - 2024

World Bank
User Research and Strategic Design Consultant
2022

OLX Group
Product Design Manager
2020 - 2021

OLX Autos
Product Design Lead
2019 - 2020

Frontier Car Group
Senior Product Designer
2017 - 2019

thinkmoney
Senior Product Designer
2013 - 2017

Virgin Wines
UX and UI Designer
2007 - 2013

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Recent clients and collaboratorsBrown University
Cambodian Ministry of Health
Center for Disease Control
Center for the Advancement of Infrastructural Imagination (CAII)
Gates Foundation
Global Connect
Partners In Health
Regenstrief Institute
Sonder Design
OLX Group
Open Concept Lab
OpenFn
OpenMRS
University of California (San Francisco)
University of Nairobi
World Bank
World Health Organization

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Skills
Product design
User research
Object Oriented UX practitioner
Interaction design
User experience
Information architecture
Usability testing
Design systems
AI-powered prototyping
Field studies
Unmoderated testing
Participatory design
Design management
Branding
Stakeholder management
Qualatative analysis
Strategic workshop design and facilitation

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Outputs
Native applications (iOS and Android)
Web applications
User research studies
Service blueprints
Product strategy
Websites and landing pages

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Selected work

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1. Pathways
Using population segmentation data to reveal barriers to good health and inform targeted approaches to overcome them

Mobile and Desktop web application

Funder: Gates Foundation
User Research Object-Oriented UX Product Design

Current health systems globally are failing to address the disproportionate burden of disease borne by women and children. Vertical programmes focused on isolated conditions, combined with homogenous solutions that overlook meaningful variation within communities, leave vulnerable populations systematically underserved.

As part of the broader Pathways initiative, I joined the team to help design a publicly available digital platform surfacing population segmentation data, insights and decision-making tools to inform more targeted health interventions. Given the novelty of the solution, research centred on how users consumed and worked with data and content within their own professional contexts and what that implied for the platform's content design and feature set. I worked closely with the Platform Design Lead to translate these findings into a coherent Product Design approach.

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2. OpenMRS
Redesigning the world's most widely used open-source electronic medical record system

Tablet and Desktop web application

Clients: OpenMRS Inc, UCSF, CDC
Scalable Design System Full Product Redesign Design Leadership User Research Community Co-Design Usability Testing

OpenMRS is a digital public good supporting clinical operations for millions of patients across low and middle-income countries, relied upon by organisations from small NGOs to national Ministries of Health. As the ecosystem expanded, fragmentation followed: organisations forked the frontend independently, meaning collaboration was difficult and the navigation model had accrued modules without a coherent underlying architecture. We conducted field research across clinical sites in East and sub-Saharan Africa, observing staff working with unreliable power, shared devices and high patient throughput then redesigned the information architecture around patient care workflows, built CarbonMRS Design System and facilitated community working sessions across multiple countries to ensure design decisions were taken in a spirit of cooperation and sensitivity to local requirements.

The resulting system, released as OpenMRS 3, is now deployed across more than 8,000 facilities in over 80 countries, with upwards of 22 million patient records under management. For clinical staff, the redesign reduced task complexity and aligned information hierarchy with actual clinical decision-making sequences. For developers, the shared component library eliminated redundant effort and made cross-organisational contribution viable. Beyond the artefacts, the process established a design culture in which UX decisions are made transparently across a distributed global community.

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3. Partners In Health
Research, strategy and design for in-patient care with a focus on maternal and child health in Sierra Leone

Desktop web application

Client: Partners In Health
User Research Product Design Design Leadership

Commissioned by Partners In Health, this project focused on designing a new inpatient care feature set for OpenMRS, developed in direct support of a new maternal and neonatal unit at Koidu Government Hospital in Kono, Sierra Leone, a facility in which digital health infrastructure was central to improving patient outcomes from the outset.

To ensure the resulting features served both PIH's specific clinical context and the broader OpenMRS community, I assembled a global research group spanning multiple countries and care contexts, unified by a focus on inpatient care delivery. Discovery research identified two critical gaps: a lack of timely visibility into outstanding orders for investigations, labs and treatments and inadequate handover of clinical notes between shifts. The subsequent design phase centred on a Ward View for large wall-mounted screens and smaller tablet devices to surface outstanding requests and patient status at a glance, as well as to guide handover meetings. The application was tested on-site with midwives at KGH ahead of the facility opening and feedback has remained positive from prototype through to deployment, with the President of Sierra Leone even having a personal demo.

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4. World Bank Group
Using design research to inform the digitisation of NCD screening and care in Cambodia

Research report, Digital training tool, Patient flow diagrams, User interface

Client: World Bank / Cambodian Ministry of Health
User Research Product Design Co-design

Engaged by the World Bank, this project centred on user research to inform the national rollout of an electronic medical records system in Cambodia, with a population-level goal of reducing the burden of non-communicable diseases.

Over eight weeks in-country, I conducted research across multiple provinces, observing patient visits at every level of the health system, from busy urban facilities to rural health posts and engaging frontline clinical staff, district administrators and government ministers. This breadth of fieldwork informed a user-focused needs assessment report that surfaced the practical realities of healthcare delivery across diverse operating contexts. I translated my findings into patient flow diagrams, detailed insight reports, digital training tools and user interfaces to guide the development of digital workflows, ensuring the resulting system remained grounded in the conditions and constraints of public health facilities at scale.

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5. Open Concept Lab
New foundations rooted in the users mental model for an essential piece of digital health infrastructure

Web application

Client: Open Concept Lab
User Research Product Design Co-design Branding

Open Concept Lab is an open-source community building tools that enable medical terminologists to create, manage and collaborate on the clinical terminology content underpinning health technology and outcomes. It’s painstaking, high-stakes work that OCL exists to make more exact and efficient.

As new opportunities for dynamic use of terminology resources emerged, technical capability was outpacing user experience. Prototyping had been occurring directly in production, with no design system or shared guidelines, with new users reporting a complex interface, difficult to navigate and with steep learning curves for new users despite the platform's clear value. The team at the University of Indiana and Regenstrief Institute recognised that design capacity needed to be established before a forthcoming wave of novel features compounded the problem further.

I applied an Object-Oriented UX methodology to ground the information architecture in the mental models of the people doing the work: medical terminologists with deep domain expertise and low tolerance for unnecessary UI complexity, alongside users managing terminology as one component of broader technical or clinical responsibilities. Rather than continuing to prototype in production, we rebuilt the core of the application in Figma using a new component library, iterating with users in the community before committing to development.

The result was a broad redesign introducing deeper collaboration features, more dynamic use of terminology content and improved efficiency across core workflows, giving OCL a coherent structural foundation from which to support increasingly diverse repositories, including FHIR resources. The core challenge was one I encounter often in technically strong open-source teams… genuine capability without the design infrastructure to match. The work was less about aesthetics than about creating the conditions for the platform to grow with solid design principles at the heat of decision making, even after project engagements wrap up.

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6. OpenFn
Bridging the gap between clients and consultants in workflow automation for good

Web application

Client: OpenFn

Product Design Co-design Design sprint

OpenFn is the leading digital public good for workflow automation open-source software trusted by NGOs and governments across 40+ countries to build, run and monitor data integration solutions that deliver more efficient health and humanitarian operations. As both a recognised Global Good for Health and an OpenHIE-compliant workflow engine, the platform operates at significant scale and consequence around the world.

As the platform matured, the complexity of its workflow builder and pipeline diagnostics tools needed to move OpenFn beyond a consultant driven model, so the team engaged myself and a colleague to help figure out the next steps. Building automations and identifying failures in message pipelines required technical fluency that created barriers for the clients who rely on the system daily.

Over a focused ten-day design sprint with the internal team, we moved rapidly through problem definition, prototyping and testing to design a new visual workflow builder and a dedicated tool for diagnosing issues within message pipelines. Working directly with the team compressed the feedback loop and allowed design decisions to be stress-tested against real implementation knowledge before remote usability testing with real users

The sprint produced validated prototypes for both tools: a visual builder that reduced the technical overhead of constructing automations and a diagnostics interface that made pipeline failures legible and actionable. Together, they represent a meaningful step toward making OpenFn's considerable power accessible to a broader range of users operating across diverse and resource-constrained deployment contexts.

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7. The Syllabus

A wellspring for those seeking to be informed, keeping up on societal creativity and inspiration for future policy

Mobile and Desktop web application

Client: Center for the Advancement of Infrastructural Imagination
System analysis Object-Oriented UX Information Architecture Full Product Redesign

The Syllabus is a paid product of the Center for the Advancement of Infrastructural Imagination, serving journalists, researchers, academics and critical thinkers by surfacing essential content outside of algorithmic mediation. A combination of subscriber preferences and human curation delivers a weekly digest of overlooked material, but as the platform's capabilities expanded, the user experience needed to keep pace. Content of genuine depth sat in silos and the architecture offered inadequate support for discovery and extractions of interesting information called nuggets.

A structured audit of the existing system produced a simplified system map with clearer relational logic between content. From here, I redesigned the public-facing homepage to surface the weekly digest directly, reducing friction between prospective users and the platform's core value proposition, as well as the subscriber application and a suite of new AI-powered tools.

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© DESIGN BÜRO PAUL ADAMS 2026.