Blaise Galinier - Projects & Case Studies

Elsevier

Modernising Elsevier’s API Experience for an AI‑Driven World

Role: UX, UI, Strategy, Transformation Time: 4 months Team: 1PM, 1 content writer, 12 devs, 1 tech architect

Elsevier’s APIs were powerful but fragmented, shaped by internal silos and legacy workflows. The existing portal felt dated, and the team was deep in MVP fatigue. My role was to support short‑term delivery while defining a long‑term developer experience vision that aligned with modern expectations — including AI‑assisted coding, clearer commercial models, and a more coherent API ecosystem.

Key contributions

Modernised the experience by adopting the new design system and moving beyond Swagger‑style layouts.
Defined a strategic vision covering user groups, experience principles, governance, and internal tooling — not just UI.
Designed for AI‑mediated workflows, including agent‑friendly documentation and “export for LLM” features.
Reframed the portal from a documentation site into a service that supports researchers, developers, and organisations end‑to‑end.

Outcome

A stable MVP delivered without disruption, and a future direction that helped reposition Elsevier’s APIs as first‑class products with a modern, developer‑centred experience.

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"I never read API specs — I just ask Copilot."
— The user quote that captured the shift

Modernising Elsevier’s API Experience for an AI‑Driven World

BBC

BBC Flexible Media

Role: Lead UX / Product Designer Time: Ongoing Team: Consumer UX/UI, BBC R&D, product managers, newsroom teams, iPlayer & BBC Sounds platform leads

Tri-platform ecosystem: Connected TV playback, iPlayer Web, and Mobile companion

BBC R&D had years of research around personalised media but lacked a unified framework to translate insights into viable consumer experiences — and lacked the back-of-house tools required for staff to produce them.

Key contributions

Breaking the Deadlock: Prioritized delivering working, production-ready authoring tools so editorial teams could start generating structured data immediately.
Pragmatic AI Assistance: Designed AI capabilities directly into the workflow to automatically suggest segment boundaries, descriptions, and cover images.
Human-in-the-Loop Control: Kept editors in the driving seat by allowing them to review, modify, or reject AI suggestions.
Context-Driven UI: Tailored the playback experience to each device's natural mode of use instead of forcing identical feature parity.

Outcome

Delivered working editorial tools that unblocked the ecosystem, secured core business funding to bring personalization to iPlayer and Sounds, and established foundational architecture that is rolling out to live products today.

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Personal Project

Vibe Coding This Portfolio with Antigravity

Role: AI, Vibe Coding, Systems Architecture Time: 2026 Team: Solo Design Director + Google Antigravity

Instead of spending weeks pushing pixels in Figma and wrestling with Webflow templates, I wanted to build a modern, living portfolio that reflects how I actually work today: hands-on, systems-first, and AI-native.

Key features

AI Pair-Programming: Directed Google Antigravity through complex terminal workflows, state management, and continuous deployments.
Dynamic Pitch Generation: Designed an automated role-fit engine that ingests job descriptions via Gemini to produce tailored /hello/slug landing pages and aligned CVs.
Privacy-First Telemetry: Engineered a custom /admin dashboard tracking live visitor dwell time, scroll depth, and pitch queries without third-party tracking cookies.
Zero Framework Overhead: Architected pure Vite, vanilla JS, and CSS custom properties for instant sub-second performance.

Outcome

Proves that systems architecture paired with autonomous AI lets one design leader ship with the velocity of an entire team.

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"As a designer, building with AI should be much more than 'turn this Figma into HTML'. It's about pushing the AI to handle as much of the hands on work while maintaining quality and following a vision."
— The approach to building with AI

Live Public Portfolio: AI-enabled, lightweight, and fast

Private Admin Telemetry: Live visitor metrics, dwell time, and pitch management

BBC

BBC Metadata Transformation

Role: Lead UX / Product Designer Time: Ongoing Team: UX designers, researchers, external agency partners, PMs, data architects, engineering leads, editorial teams, taxonomy specialists

The BBC has a vast catalogue of world-class content, but due to poor, fragmented metadata, the organisation struggled to fully understand its assets. The brief was to build a modern tagging tool to replace disparate legacy systems and improve content classification across the enterprise.

Key contributions

Ambitious North Star: Created a provocative concept prototype to secure executive buy-in.
Embedded Workflows: Integrated core tagging directly into daily production tools like Optimo so journalists didn't have to context-switch.
Semantic Predicates: Injected humanity into structured data by creating clear editorial semantics instead of a free-for-all tagging system.
Dedicated Specialist Tools: Designed taxonomy management interfaces specifically for data owners and specialists.

Outcome

Over 5.7 million content items tagged and migrated, growing by 2,000+ new passports daily across BBC News, iPlayer, Sounds, Sport, and CBBC.

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BBC Passport Control: Editorial tagging interface with structured semantic predicates and tag assistance

Other Projects

Smaller case studies and initiatives that don't require a dedicated page.

Other innovation projects

Yota Devices

YotaPhone

I created a UI approach for this unusual double-sided phone, making the most of the e-ink screen’s outdoors readability, low power consumption and permanence.

Learning Mobile OS design

Sky, Canal+, Fox

Xbox video service

I designed the information architecture and user journeys for Sky, Canal+ and Fox Australia on Xbox 360.

Learning Designing for controller-based UIs within restrictive platform guidelines

Westfield, Museums

Physical installations

I designed interactive kiosks for shopping centres, and museums.

Learning Designing for physical experiences and spatial user journeys

Other B2B projects

BBC

BBC journalist & supplier workflows

I drove the redesign of end-to-end workflows for BBC staff and suppliers. I led the design of the BBC’s new articles, video and images management systems, replacing 20-year-old legacy system. These are now rolled out to 5000 journalists.

Learning Service mapping, change management, user research with journalists

BBC

Service Design training

I led the introduction of the service design discipline at the BBC. I co-created the BBC’s in-house service design training and trained over 100 designers and business colleagues. I also ran service design workshops and talked at several conferences and events.

Learning Service design expertise, public speaking