Sean Valadão Duarte
Sean Valadão Duarte is a Senior Product & Experience Designer based in Lisboa, specialising in clear, scalable digital products across UX research, strategy and systemised UI. Outside of work, he can usually be found watching Arsenal on the weekends, making ambient tunes in the evenings, and practising his questionable Portuguese whenever he can.
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Work
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Exceptional ALIEN
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Venues NSW
- McGrath
- Optimize Mind Performance
- Novii
- Constantinople
- Sportsbet
- Invocare
- Finstro (Coming soon)
- Redback (Coming soon)
- Powershop (Coming soon)
Constantinople
Role: Lead UX/UI Designer
Industry: Fintech
Time: 8 weeks
Delivered: Website build
We helped Constantinople turn a complex banking platform into a clear, confidence building product story that educates, reassures and supports growth.
Overview:Constantinople is a cloud native banking platform operating in a category defined by complexity and risk. For banks, buyers and investors, understanding how the platform works is inseparable from trusting why it matters. The work focused on presenting Constantinople as capable and credible, with clarity, education, and reassurance taking precedence over abstraction or technical excess.
Task: Define and articulate the platform offering into a clear and accessible product narrative. This involved structuring the product story, simplifying language and shaping an experience that explains complexity without diminishing it.
Problem:The platform was powerful but difficult to explain. Existing messaging placed unnecessary cognitive load on users by leaning either too technical or too high level. In a category where confidence is critical, a lack of clarity created friction at the point of understanding.
ApproachReading the marketWe conducted a broad review of direct and indirect platforms across core banking, BaaS, financial infrastructure and developer tooling to understand how leading products explain complexity, build confidence and guide decision making.
The analysis focused on visual hierarchy, messaging clarity and conversion paths, with attention paid to how platforms educate different audiences while maintaining credibility across technical and executive stakeholders.
Product clarity builds trust
Market leaders invested heavily in clear product breakdowns, supported by structured hubs and disclosure. Platforms that explained what they do simply appeared to reduce friction and increase confidence early.
Education outperforms persuasion
The strongest competitors prioritised education through guides, explainers, documentation and examples. This positioned their product as transparent and dependable rather than sales driven (something CXNPL also specifically didn’t want).
Evidence reduces perceived riskMetrics, case studies, milestones and testimonials were consistently used across direct and indirect markets to legitimise claims. Evidence was treated as a core layer of the experience and not supporting content.
Different audiences need different entry pointsSuccessful platforms accommodated multiple user mindsets, from executives to developers, without fragmenting the narrative. Clear pathways allowed different users to discover the right information they needed to help inform their decision making.
ApproachProject principlesWith the analysis completed, this helped define the project principles, alongside an understanding of how complex financial infrastructure products are evaluated in practice.
In a category that is still emerging, where products are difficult to compare and trust is still emerging, clarity becomes a prerequisite for credibility. Our principles focused on reducing cognitive load, establishing legitimacy and supporting informed decision making in a market where confidence is inseparable from understanding.
Legitimacy as a market shaping company
Position Constantinople as an authority within modern banking infrastructure and not simply a service provider. Legitimacy is established through clarity, restraint and a sense of inevitability rather than volume or hype.
Clarity over persuasion
Reduce cognitive load by prioritising explanation. The product should be understandable at a glance and defensible at depth, allowing users to move forward with confidence rather than conviction.
Confidence through evidence
Trust is earned by showing how the platform works, where it fits and why it matters. Proof points, structure and transparency should be core elements of the expereince.
Make complexity feel considered
Acknowledge the sophistication of the platform without overwhelming the user. Complexity is framed as intentional and controlled, reinforcing the sense that the system is stable, mature, adaptable and dependable.
ApproachOur core HMWHow might we make a complex banking platform understandable, credible and reassuring from first contact through to deeper evaluation?
Approach
Structuring understanding
The information architecture evolved over several iterations as leadership perspectives shifted on what the site needed to prioritise. Focus moved between commercial positioning, technical explanation, and investor context before returning to the original MVP intent.
The final structure centred on a lighter site built around clarity and education, with future expansion mapped for deeper support over time. With copy intentionally reduced, the architecture carried more responsibility in guiding understanding.
The sitemap was structured to lead with why the platform matters, supported by evidence through case studies, before detailing how the platform works. This reflected how banking products are evaluated in practice, allowing value and confidence to be established first, with deeper detail available for leadership and technical audiences as needed.
The IA above outlines what was agreed upon for the future roadmap of the website. Larger initiatives, such as a dedicated developer hub with logins and platform access, were intentionally excluded from the MVP and positioned as part of a broader, longer-term platform vision for ongoing and emerging customers.
Solution
Education & evidence first
The website was designed to educate and support users by clearly explaining how the platform works and why it benefits customer banks. Rather than leading with technical depth alone, the experience prioritised understanding and reassurance, helping users build confidence before engaging with complexity.
Education and evidence were treated as core elements of the experience, supporting decision making and grounding the platform’s value in real, in-market examples.
Homepage
- A holistic introduction to Constantinople, moving from why it is different in the market through to how the platform works. The homepage was designed as a primary entry point, giving business and technical leaders a clear grasp of the core value proposition and the ability to explore and learn with ease.
- To help users quickly understand both the why and the how of the value proposition, the introduction to Constantinople was led by a short video featuring the CEO’s, explaining the platform and its role in supporting banks into the future.
- Visual communication reinforced this narrative through indicative representations of the platform, drawing on in-market product examples, ecosystem motifs and brand identity.
Why: value & market difference
- The dedicated Why Constantinople page helped users understand the core value of the platform through key milestones, how we work definition and testimonials from customers who have built their banks on Constantinople. This was a central part of the experience, allowing banking leadership to clearly grasp the platform’s market difference to help nudge lead conversion.
Evidence as lead conversion
- Across the Homepage and Why Constantinople pages, a curated carousel of case studies from key Australian banking customers was introduced. These combined leadership testimonials with customer facing product examples to demonstrate capability and alignment with each bank’s brand and service needs.
While originally intended to launch as detailed article breakouts, the case studies were positioned as lead conversion points due to shifting alignment. The longer term intent remained to elevate case studies as a primary source of education and evidence beyond the MVP.
How: Holistic platform definition
- Dedicated pages were created for each of the six services offered by Constantinople. Each page clearly defined what the service includes, supported by visual examples and brand identifiers to aid understanding and engagement.
- Across the homepage platform modules, sub-category navigation was introduced to give users a high level view of each service and direct access to specific topics. This allowed users to move easily between overview and detail, depending on the depth of information required.
SolutionMinimal & scalable UIWorking alongisde the brand team, we collectively explored how the modules would be defined within the new visual direction. Given the strength of the updated identity, the approach was intentionally minimal, allowing the brand to breathe and remain the focal point of the experience.
Each module was designed as a clear, repeatable unit and implemented through an atomised system, supporting consistency, reuse and ease of application across the Constantinople site. Colour was used sparingly to allow brand collateral and client identities to feature, with the core orange reserved for accents, interactions and hover states.
With key UI elements already established in the brand guidelines, the focus was on translating the identity into a scalable interface defined by MVP and future content needs.
Overall, my role within UI focused on defining module types and styling, and supporting the UI designer in rolling out the atomised system and wireframes through to handover.
OutcomeClear roadmap for the futureWhat was ultimately delivered for CXNPL differed from the initial proposal. The original experience was intended to lean more heavily into evidence and the why, clearly demonstrating how the platform could positively impact modern banks.
As client requests shifted and timelines tightened, the strategy was adapted into a lighter MVP. While indecision was a recurring challenge, clear next steps were still defined, alongside a longer-term view of how the website could support and educate customers over time. Following the MVP delivery, the next phase was framed around the exploration and rollout of the following experiences.
Developer Hub
A dedicated space for deeper technical support and education, designed for technical leadership within banking partners and prospective customers. This hub would provide documentation, guidance, and tooling to assess integration fit, troubleshoot issues, and understand how CXNPL’s services align with existing systems.
Core Product HubDistinct from the developer hub, this would function as a lighter onboarding and ongoing support space. It would allow prospective and existing customers to explore services in greater detail, model customer products and potentially act as a web-based extension of the Justinian console. This space could also support assisted help, through AI or human support, depending on partner needs.
Team
Head of Product - Russel Privett
Lead Strategist - Alex Vitlin
Lead UX/UI Designer - Sean Valadão Duarte
Head of Design - Razif Djamaludin
Director of Design - Andy Reynolds
Senior Brand Designer - Boaz Suen
Brand & UX Content Strategist - Chloe Hayman
Tasks
Discovery
Ideation
IA & System Mapping
Futrue Road Mapping
UI Design
Design Systems
Logic & Interaction Documentation