AI Social Intelligence Platform

I joined Pendulum as Head of Design when there was nothing. No design system, no patterns, no visual language. Over the next eight months I designed every screen, every flow, and every component of an AI social intelligence platform that monitors 38.6M sources in 75 languages. The company went on to raise a Series A.

The product serves risk analysts at places like Google and AT&T. My job was to make sense of an enormous amount of data and AI capability that had no coherent interface yet.

The Problem

The platform had powerful AI capabilities but the UX was completely fragmented. Each feature existed in isolation. Users couldn't navigate from one experience to the next without losing context. Power Insights and RiskWand, the platform's most valuable features, were buried so deep in navigation that most users never found them.

The result: a product rich in data but poor in clarity. Customers were confused. The platform wasn't delivering on its promise.

Process: UX Audit & Discovery

The first decision was to build the design system before touching a single product screen. With no visual consistency and no shared patterns, the system was the prerequisite, not the deliverable.

From there: a comprehensive UX audit across all existing flows, user interviews to map where people lost context and abandoned tasks, and cross-feature flow mapping to understand how brand creation, topic creation, Risk One, and the rest were supposed to connect.

Narratives Experience

Redesigned from scratch with advanced data visualisation and AI-powered narrative search. Users input broad topics and Pendulum's AI refines the results, surfacing the most relevant content and making narrative analysis faster and more targeted.

The new design brought the AI capabilities to the forefront rather than burying them in secondary menus.

3D Landscapes of Risk

Abstract risk data transformed into interactive 3D maps where threats appear as topographical features based on magnitude, urgency, and interconnectedness. Complexity made tangible.

RiskWand takes this further, allowing analysts to explore narrative clusters radially, revealing relationships invisible in flat list views.

Threats Library

A comprehensive, AI-categorised collection of threats organised by industry, severity, and location. The library is the intelligence backbone, turning an overwhelming data set into a navigable tool analysts return to daily.

AI-Assisted Onboarding

Pendulum's updated onboarding uses AI assistance to guide new users through adding their company's assets, key executives, historical risks, and current narratives, so the platform delivers personalised value from day one, before any manual configuration.

I designed every pixel of this product. The design system, the data interfaces, the agentic workflows, the onboarding. When you're the only designer on something this complex, you learn to move fast and make decisions that hold up.