About

Designing for high-stakes clarity.

I design where complex systems, data, and real consequences meet.

Seven of those years have been in FinTech. Portfolio dashboards that guide capital allocation. Debt tools that move millions in exposure. Workflows that have to be accurate, compliant, and trusted.

I'm most energized when the problem is messy.

Ambiguous requirements. Fragmented data. A dozen stakeholders who don't agree yet.

What I bring depends on what the moment needs. The direct question that turns a vague ask into a strategy. The coaching that helps a designer win the room. The plan that raises a team's UX maturity. The agents that let everyone move faster on routine work and go deeper on the parts that need real craft.

Ryan Higgins

Career Arc

The road to here.

Eighteen years of milestones, inflection points, and the lessons each era left behind — from first internship to founding Fathom.

Inflection Point
Wisdom
Milestone

2008 – 11

Entered the Industry

  • 3rd Row Interactive — intern
  • WilmU Admissions — part-time
  • Graduated with a B.S. in Interaction Design
  • Lead Web Designer, Wilmington University
2010 – 11Inflection

The Web Started Moving

  • Responsive web became a practice, not a theory
  • Flash began its decline

Bet on principles, not tools. Tools get deprecated.

2013 – 14

WilmU's First Responsive Site

  • Led WilmU's first fully responsive website
  • Presented the project directly to the university president
2014Inflection

Started Teaching

  • Started teaching Interaction Design at WilmU
  • Refused to include Flash in the curriculum

Getting stakeholder trust is its own design problem.

Teaching forces you to know why, not just how.

2016 – 17

Digital Design & Development Manager

Promoted from individual contributor to manager. Went from designing systems to building the team that designs them.

2017Inflection

Built the First Design System

  • Built a shared component library and visual language from scratch

The best managers design conditions for people to do their best work.

A design system is a living agreement, not a deliverable.

2019 – 21

Staff Product Designer, Chatham Financial

Left higher ed for FinTech. Design decisions now influenced billions in hedging exposure. The stakes and the rigor required both went up.

2020Inflection

The Pandemic

  • Remote work was forced overnight
  • Async-first collaboration replaced in-person process

High-stakes environments clarify what design actually needs to do.

Clarity in process becomes survival when you lose the hallway.

2021 – 22

The Platform That Didn't Ship

A greenfield platform shelved after significant investment. The most important lesson in organizational dynamics over design quality.

The work isn't wasted. The learning lives in the next problem.

2022 – Present

Onyx & ChatFIN

  • Onyx — Chatham's AI-native Capital Markets & Investment Management OS
  • ChatFIN — the intelligent AI stitching signal to insight to action
  • Built and shared a suite of design + cross-functional AI agents
2025Inflection

AI Changes the Work

  • Started Onyx — proactive risk identification and mitigation for institutional investors
  • End-to-end investment lifecycle with data traced to source and lineage
  • AI-assisted dev replaced wireframe debates

The tools changed again. This time, I wasn't surprised.

2026 – Present

Fathom & Unruly Vision

  • An AI vision app for blind and low-vision users, built as a solo founder
  • FathomUI — an accessibility-first design system
  • Concept to App Store launch in four months — first Fathom Plus subscriptions in week one
  • Learning to launch, measure, and grow a product
2026Inflection

Founded Unruly Vision

  • The company that spun out of Fathom, made real
  • Starts with one app — not ending there
  • Hiring blind and low-vision employees to activate adoption, product maturity, and growth

The job title changes. The need to stay curious doesn't.

How I Think

I don't design screens.
I design systems.

My start in frontend code keeps me honest about what's actually buildable. A decade of teaching keeps me honest about the fundamentals. And I steal ideas from fields that have nothing to do with design to question "the way we've always done it."

The best part of the job is alignment. I tell the story behind the pain point so people from different disciplines see it the same way and ship the right thing earlier.

I care deeply about:

Reducing cognitive load in data-heavy environments
Making risk and uncertainty visible, not hidden
Designing workflows that protect data integrity
Progressive disclosure that respects executive time
Turning complexity into clarity without oversimplifying reality

AI-Native Product Development

The way I build changed, and I changed early.

I work AI-native now. Custom agents and structured context cut research from weeks to hours and turn static wireframes into working prototypes on real data.

Instead of debating wireframes, we test working systems.

The bigger shift is the team. I build agents and skills that people across the company, from HR to design, use to move fast on routine work, so they can go deep on what needs critical thinking, attention to detail, and craft.

I don't hoard tooling. I build it so everyone gets sharper.

Accessibility & Perspective

Accessibility isn't a feature.
It's foundational.

I became visually impaired at a young age due to Leber's Hereditary Optic Neuropathy. That experience fundamentally shaped how I think about clarity, hierarchy, and usability.

Designing interfaces I can confidently navigate — and that others can trust — has made me more rigorous about structure, feedback, and system transparency.

Right Now

What I'm Focused On

I'm drawn to environments where design shapes strategy, not just the interface.

AI Transformation People Actually Adopt
Agentic Systems That Augment Decisions
Raising a Team's Design and AI Maturity
Executive Dashboards That Cut Noise
Small, High-Leverage Teams
Orgs That Value Thoughtful Scaling
View My Work Connect on LinkedIn