Ariena “Ari” PhannaenUX/UI · Product · UX Engineer
Six years across enterprise, corporate, and startup teams — insurance, healthcare, and enterprise products — from research and information architecture through interface design, design systems, and working front-end prototypes. I don’t hand off mockups. I think in components, states, and transitions.
Different budgets, different risk appetites, different definitions of “done”. The constraint that never changes is the person on the other side of the screen.
Corporate
Travel insurance · 2024
Small business
Healthcare · 2026
Enterprise
IT services · 2019
Startup
AI petcare · 2025
Each project is a system-level problem — multi-user healthcare triage, travel insurance conversion, enterprise impact reporting, content navigation, and turning local search into booked appointments. The order below reflects how much each one explains about the way I work, not how recent it is.
Predictive petcare ecosystem connecting owners, nurses, and clinics through empathy-driven design.
Southern Cross Travel Insurance
Redesigning the travel insurance purchase flow to reduce drop-off and increase conversions
Datacom
Enterprise portal enabling data-driven impact reporting and company performance analysis
Acupoints Medical & Wellness
Website and local SEO for a West Auckland acupuncture clinic, built to turn searches into booked consultations
Southern Cross Travel Insurance
Improving discoverability and content navigation across the Southern Cross Travel Insurance blog
I'm Ariena Phannaen, though most people call me Ari — a designer who believes great products are built at the intersection of empathy, systems thinking, and technical craft.
Six years in, working from Auckland, New Zealand, I've designed inside enterprise IT, a regulated insurer, and early-stage startups. Different budgets, different risk appetites, different definitions of “done”. What carries across is knowing where people get stuck — and being able to build the case for fixing it.
My work spans UX research, interface design, interaction design, and front-end prototyping. I don't just hand off mockups — I think in components, states, and transitions. On Luniby and the Acupoints site I designed and built the thing myself, which removes the translation layer between the decision and what ships.
Whether it's a healthcare platform that saves lives, an insurance purchase flow thousands of travellers pass through, or a clinic website that helps someone in pain take the first step, I approach every project with the same question: how can this be more intentional?
Pixel-level attention to visual design, interaction patterns, and accessibility. Every interface element is intentional.
I see beyond screens — mapping user journeys, business models, and technical constraints into cohesive product systems.
I speak the language of developers. State management, component architecture, and performance are part of my design process.
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Ariena “Ari” Phannaen — UX/UI, Product & UX Engineering
Every discipline below links straight to the part of a case study where that work is documented.
Startups taught me to argue for revenue. Enterprise taught me to argue for risk and cost. Corporate taught me to argue in someone else's language. The chain is the same in all of them — only the vocabulary changes. Run it on any of the four below.
What someone is actually stuck on — not what they ask for, but what stops them.
Where does this person give up?
Someone in pain searches for help and cannot tell whether this clinic treats their problem, or whether to trust it with their body.
Why they are stuck. Anxiety, doubt, effort, trust — the mechanism underneath the behaviour.
What is the feeling driving that?
People search by symptom, not by modality — and healthcare decisions are trust decisions before they are price decisions.
The structural answer. Flow, hierarchy, language, and the states nobody asks to see in a demo.
What has to change on the screen?
Service categories written around the patient's problem, with credentials and years of practice above the fold rather than on an About page.
How the answer gets found and believed. Search intent, positioning, proof, and the size of the ask.
How does the right person meet it, and say yes?
Page structure built around the terms people actually search, and a free first consultation to lower the cost of saying yes.
What the organisation actually gets. Conversion, retention, capacity, or cost.
What does this move on the balance sheet?
Local searches turn into booked consultations.
Every figure above is documented in the case study it came from — the Acupoints write-up shows the working.
Motion is a communication layer, not a finish. Each pattern below states what triggers it, what it does, and the cognitive job it is doing — the same rationale I write into a spec for engineering.
Components, states, and tokens — not a screenshot of a library, but the working primitives this site is built from. It is how I hand work to engineering: every state accounted for, every value named.
The floor is published so you can work out whether this is a conversation worth having before you send the email. What sits above it depends on scope, timeline, and how long we work together — all three are named below.
From$40NZD / hour
Quoted and invoiced in New Zealand dollars, for clients in New Zealand, Australia, and further afield. Tell me what you are trying to ship and I will come back with a number against it — not a bracket.
From $40 NZD/hr
Billed by the hour
Design, research, or front-end work billed as it is done. Suits audits, advisory, and short, well-defined pieces of work.
Hourly rate, agreed weekly
Set hours each week
A standing number of hours alongside your team, so design keeps pace with delivery instead of arriving in bursts.
Quoted against the brief
One price, one outcome
A defined deliverable — a site, a purchase flow, a design system — scoped and priced up front from the hourly rate.
Day rate or salary
Through to full-time
Longer engagements are negotiated as a day rate or salary rather than by the hour. Open across New Zealand, Australia, and remote.
A design review sits at the floor. Research, a design system, and a built front-end move up from it.
Ordinary lead times hold the rate. Compressed deadlines and out-of-hours work are priced separately.
Ongoing and longer-term work is agreed at a better rate than one-off hours.
Based in Auckland, New Zealand, working with New Zealand, Australian and global clients. Open to part-time, full-time, permanent and contract roles, plus consulting engagements — particularly work where research, systems, and engineering have to meet in one person.
ariena.phan@gmail.com
Fastest route — roles, projects, or a question about the work.
+64 27 929 3666
Call or text if you would rather talk it through.
+64 27 929 3666
Easiest across time zones if you are outside New Zealand.
in/arienaphannaen
Full work history, recommendations, and the fastest way to check me out.
arienaphannaen
Client work in full, including Southern Cross Travel Insurance and Datacom.