I’m Aivars, a senior product designer in Riga with 10+ years in digital products, the last seven in insurance. I decide with data, use AI to explore more ideas and reach results faster, and build systems of reusable components so teams never start from zero. Fast in hackathons, patient in regulated rooms full of stakeholders, and with cybersecurity as my second craft, I design for trust from the first sketch.
Four projects, written as briefs: the problem, the goal, the decisions, and what happened.
Smaller projects, hackathon builds and freelance work. Shorter stories, same habits.
Where If’s private and business customers handle their insurance without calling anyone. I work on the action flows inside it: small tasks in a modal, so you finish the job without losing your place. Most of my fixes start from behavioural data. Find where people stall, fix that first.
Reporting a claim by chatting instead of filling in a form. The hard part is invisible: whatever the customer types, the claims handler still needs clean, structured information at the other end. I’ve worked on its improvements and upgrades over time, always with the same aim: less typing for the customer, cleaner answers for the claims handler.
When someone gets hurt at work in Finland, their employer reports it. I mapped the existing journey screen by screen, marked what to fix, and prototyped new flows. They split the work between the line manager and HR, so each person only answers what they actually know.
Insurance terms are long, and nobody reads them until they need to. InteliSearch let people ask a question in plain words and get the answer from our documents, using GPT and Cognitive Search. Built at a hackathon with a small team of developers; I designed the search experience and the interface, from the first sketch to the demo.
A plug-in that makes websites usable for people who rely on assistive technology. Built at a hackathon; I designed the chat experience and made sure it works with screen readers and keyboard navigation.
A web app for mapping business ecosystems: who works with whom, and how. I started by taking competitors apart, then got building a full ecosystem down to three steps. The colours are a little playful, because people look at it all day at work, but never loud enough to get in the way.
A new site for a New York marketing agency that had just rebranded and wanted anything but a template. Full-page slides, horizontal scrolling, and a radar animation behind the line “Small in size. Not scope.”
A website redesign for Muro North America, a screw gun maker. Proof that I can get excited about screw guns. The redesign gave the product range a clearer structure, so buyers find the right tool and its specs in a few clicks.
A TikTok-style app where artists find fans by entering video contests. I designed the core flows: watching and voting on contest videos, entering a contest, and signing up.
What I do outside the day job: workshops, teaching, hackathons, and breaking into things on purpose.
I run innovation workshops and bootcamps for startup teams, enterprises and government organisations, together with co-facilitators. Teams pick a prototype strategy, build a prototype (vibe coding included), write a test scenario and run their first user tests, often in a day or two.
At the Startup House Riga pre-accelerator that meant 20+ teams in two days, with ideas from digital services to camera accessories and a robot that scans solar panels.
Hackathons are my driving force for fast design decisions, quick prototyping and validating ideas before they cost anything. InteliSearch and Chatibility both started at one.
Every year If’s Experience Design community meets in a different country: 50+ designers working together, sharing what they’ve learned and building a network across the company. In 2023 it was Riga’s turn, and I helped organise it.
I keep learning through workshops, courses and talks. UXLx in Lisbon was one of them, with a product management workshop led by Christian Crumlish.
I present design thinking to organisations, universities and companies, and give talks on UX vs UI, the ROI of UX and usability. I’ve taught prototyping to the Riga TechGirls community, and this autumn I’m running a hands-on Figma AI workshop for university students.
I write about where security and UX meet.
For the past five years I’ve studied cybersecurity alongside design: how systems get attacked, defended and investigated, and how to keep them hardened.
It makes me a better designer. When you know what an attacker looks for, you know which friction protects people and which is just theatre, and you can make the trade-off on purpose.