About

I design complex software so it feels easy to use — especially where people rely on data to make fast, high-impact decisions.

For the past 8 years at Rakuten Advertising, I've worked on large-scale internal platforms used by thousands of advertisers, publishers, and account teams. Since these systems are built around large datasets, detailed reporting, and multi-step workflows, they can easily become slow, confusing, or overly technical — adding friction where users need to make vital decisions.

It's my role to remove this friction.

I take tools that require expertise and redesign them so users can understand what they're seeing, find the information they need quickly, and act with confidence — without any second-guessing.

In practical terms, this includes:

  • Simplifying dashboards and reporting tools
  • Designing search experiences that don’t require technical knowledge
  • Making complex concepts (like marketing attribution) clear and usable
  • Reducing reliance on support teams by improving usability

If you're building products, services, or workflows for people who know exactly what they want (and won't tolerate anything that slows them down), that's the kind of project where I thrive — and what I want to work on next.

Tom Spencer

Where I add value

8+ years in enterprise UX

Designing enterprise UX for data-heavy products, with experience across product design and user behaviour.

Usability & clarity

Strong focus on usability, clarity, and fast, confident decision-making.

Designing at scale

Experience designing tools used at scale, by thousands of users.

Technical domains

Comfortable working in complex, technical domains.

Cross-functional

Collaborative across product, engineering, and commercial teams to ship usable solutions.

What colleagues say

Tom hugely contributed to our project's on-time release — always available for questions, demos, and meetings when needed. His early involvement in design reviews meant issues were caught before QA, saving significant time. He also helped triage bug tickets, offering clear UX perspective on severity and priority right up to release day.
Ieva AnciukeviciuteProject Manager
I just wanted to acknowledge the work you've done taking the initiative to redesign a core feature for scalability, and coordinating across teams to leverage that into new capabilities. Keep up the great work!
Ben CurzonUX Design Manager

Outside of work

I run, hike, and travel, not because it makes me a better designer in any neat, quotable way, but because switching off completely is the only thing that actually works. Some of my clearest thinking on hard UX problems has happened somewhere between kilometre 8 and 12.

Tom hiking, travelling, and on a bridge

Want to see how this plays out in practice?

See my work