For two years, I worked as a UI/UX designer at Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications company. I sat inside a multi-disciplinary design team, shipping work across the MyTelstra app, the Prospects to Order (P2O) sales flow, and telstra.com.

Day to day, I worked across the full design process: problem framing, research, design-system work, prototyping, user testing, QA, critiques, and accessibility checks. The other skills mattered just as much: communicating with stakeholders, absorbing critique, navigating team politics. I enjoyed every step of the two years, and I kept learning the whole time.

The Able design system

When I joined Telstra in 2020, Able was three months old, and design systems in large enterprises were not yet a settled discipline. The vocabulary was still forming. Sketch was the dominant tool; Figma hadn't yet won the argument. "Design tokens" was a phrase most teams had heard but few had implemented. The hard questions were ones we now have answers to: who owns the system, how does a new component get accepted, what happens when a designer needs a one-off the library doesn't have, how do you keep the documentation in sync with the components, and how do you stop the system from forking the moment it goes out of beta.

The work for the next two years was scaling Able's components into maturity without losing the coherence that made the early version useful. By the time I left, Able had become the company's working language. It survived fast product cycles, multiple business unit redesigns, and the slow migration off Sketch.

The thing I learned inside the design system team, which feels obvious in 2026 and was contested in 2020, is that the components you can ship are the ones you build next to the engineers who'll implement them. Pairing closely with engineering wasn't the standard handoff model at the time. It was a deliberate choice. The components that came out of those pairings had a different quality than the ones produced over a Figma wall.

Accessibility

In 2020, accessibility in most large Australian companies was a marketing line. Companies acknowledged it in their values, mentioned it in pitches, and quietly skipped it in product builds. WCAG AA was the legal bar, but enforcement was thin and the cost of non-compliance lower than the cost of slowing down a release.

Telstra was the exception. There was a dedicated accessibility team. Every release passed through them. An accessibility issue was a release blocker, not a footnote. I didn't fully appreciate how rare that was until I worked in places where accessibility had to be re-argued at the start of every project.

Daily practice was the part that compounded. Focus order on screens with conditional fields. Screen reader announcements that said the right thing in the right tense. Dynamic Type that didn't break the layout three sizes up. Contrast checks that survived a dark mode toggle. None of those decisions were heroic on their own. The accumulation, over two years, was what reset what I considered normal.

Accessibility isn't a compliance checklist. It's a practice. And practices are slow to acquire and harder to lose. Telstra gave me one, and I've taken it everywhere since.

Usability testing

In 2020, running real usability testing inside a large enterprise was logistically expensive. Recruitment took weeks. Procurement had to approve participant payments. Sessions were either booked in physical labs or, by year's end, awkwardly relocated onto remote calls. Most teams skipped it. The friction was higher than the perceived value, especially for projects that thought they already knew their user.

Telstra had built the muscle. Test sessions were a routine line item, not a special request. Insights teams ran them, designers attended them, and the cadence meant we tested artifacts we'd otherwise have shipped on instinct.

The thing user testing kept teaching me is that the test isn't a check on the design. It's a check on the designer's model of the user, which is almost always wrong in some specific way you couldn't have predicted by staring at the Figma file. The best sessions weren't the ones where the design passed. They were the ones where a participant did something I'd ruled out as implausible, and I left the room with a different design than I walked in with.

What I learned

It wasn't smooth. There were pushbacks, from other missions, from stakeholders, from critique sessions, and from inside my own squad. More than once we had to restructure our working files, our ways of working, and our team structure. Every time, the process came out better for it, and the changes helped my co-designers ship cleaner work.

What stayed with me from those two years is less the specific work and more a calibration. Telstra's design system, accessibility, and testing practice set a baseline I didn't know I was acquiring at the time. Every team I've worked on since has had to clear it before the work felt honest to me, and the gap, when it shows up, is useful information in itself.

What I was proudest of wasn't a single artifact. It was every release that went out the door and into use. The work was hard, and it was worth doing.

Selected projects

Tap a project to see its screens and a short note on the work.

MyTelstra

The MyTelstra app is where a customer manages what they already have. Most of my work there had the same shape: an add-on or a device, and the whole lifecycle around it. Activate, manage, upgrade, downgrade, remove, and every error and edge state in between.

• eSIM
• Game Optimiser
• SMB Mobility Accelerator
• NBN High Speed tiers
• Trade-in
• Screen Replacement
• Airwave 5G Home Internet
• Lightyear WiFi Booster
• 5G Coverage Maps
• Telstra AIR
• Xbox Series X

Prospects to Order (P2O)

P2O is the guided sales flow for a new order. My work there was the shared, reusable parts of the funnel, and the moments where an order can quietly go wrong.

• Identification
• Global Cart Component
• Bundle plans
• Mobile Plan Cards Refresh
• CIS and Terms and Conditions uplift
• Change of Ownership