Apply the power of design to make the world simpler, smarter, and kinder.
Service design and leadership coaching.
What we do.
Making products, services, and experiences better.
Apply Design is an independent remote strategic design consultancy driven by values of creativity, openness, and collaboration. Supporting leaders in empowering teams to drive change. Helping organisations and teams to identify, design, and make ideas tangible
Research & Strategy
Service Design
Product Design & Sprints
Culture Design & Ways of Working
Leadership Coaching
Digital Transformation
Design services.
Service design consultancy and product design sprints.
Design work.
Partnering with clients to transform their services and organisations.
Leadership Coaching.
Working with intentional leaders to create meaningful impact.
"Aimee is an incredible person to work with, she's able to take a project brief and run with it. She leads with empathy and ensures that all voices are represented and understood. Aimee is a safe pair of hands and a fun person to work with."
Vimla Appadoo - Founder and Director
> Read more
How we work.
Explore & define.We begin by understanding your challenges and opportunities through discovery. Whether it’s refining customer experiences or designing new services or products, everything starts with aligning on your goals and context and setting the foundation for strategic, human-centered work.
Co-design & map.Next, together we co-create. That means using tools like service mapping, remote design sprints, and facilitated workshops to visualise current and future states and unearth areas for innovation.
Prototype & test.With ideas, we quickly prototype and test concepts to gather real user feedback while de-risking decisions, as seen in our one-week design sprints that take ideas from concept to test at speed.
Coach & enable.Parallel to designing, we can support leadership through change. We aim to help in cultivating effective leadership, psychological safety, and agile lean teams. Each stage of the work is tailored to your personal and organisational needs, to ensure sustainable impact.
Iterate & embed.The work doesn’t stop at delivery. We help embed the new ways of working by iterating and refining solutions, championing a culture of co-creation, continuous learning, and organisational transformation.
"Aimee has firsthand experience of a plethora of tools and methods at her disposal, which allows her to understand exactly what to do and when."
Phil Hesketh - Founder of Consent Kit
> Read more
Why this works.
Human-centered & strategic.Every step prioritises empathy, clarity, and meaningful outcomes.
Fast, practical experimentation.From mapping to live testing, you’ll move from insight to action in days, not months.
Leadership & culture built-in.Coaching supports teams and leaders adopt new ways of working, and evolve mindsets for change.
Adaptive & Collaborative.This flexible framework scales, from remote sessions to large organisational initiatives.
Trusted by
Let's work together.
Are you interested in designing better products, services or experiences for your customers? Let’s chat!
What people say.
Hear what clients say about working together and creating better products, services and experiences.
We believe the best measure of our work is the success of those we work with.
"Aimee is an incredible person to work with, she's able to take a project brief and run with it. She leads with empathy and ensures that all voices are represented and understood. Aimee is a safe pair of hands and a fun person to work with."
Vimla Appadoo - Founder and Director
"Aimee is a talented person to work with, she's able to take a project brief and run with it even in very complex environments she stays calm and is flexible enough to work within the situation. She has great analytic thinking skills which was key to the success of our project. Aimee's knowledge, advice and design approach made her an absolute pleasure to work with. She created a positive and enjoyable work environment and I would eagerly collaborate with her again."
Lina Nilsson - Lead Designer, Ministry of Justice
"Aimee's... understanding of performance psychology truly stands out. Her ability to break down complex thoughts into smaller, actionable bites made everything simple and practical. The session was packed with insights I can apply right away, leaving me with a clear plan to move forward. I’d highly recommend Aimee to anyone serious about enhancing their leadership skills."
Ravi Kumar Gaurav - CEO, ZongoVita
"I found that Aimee's knowledge, her thoughtful advice (it is no surprise that she's also a qualified coach!), and her approach made her an absolute pleasure to work with. She never forgets that work, particularly creative work, should always have an element of play, and fun, to make it both enjoyable and productive."
Tom Morgan - Lead Designer, UKHSA
"Aimee has firsthand experience of a plethora of tools and methods at her disposal, which allows her to understand exactly what to do and when."
Phil Hesketh - Founder of Consent Kit
"Aimee is an incredibly talented designer and a fabulously supportive team member. She’s great at getting people engaged and excited about the design process without them realising they are doing it. She’s also incredibly productive and keeps everyone’s energy up by asking powerful questions and steering us all in the right direction."
Cara Bermingham - Head of Delivery, Co-op
"Aimee speaks two languages and comes from two worlds. She is the bridge between logic and emotion. That bridge is VERY POWERFUL."
Lauren Currie - Founder of Upfront
"Aimee was incredibly helpful in clarifying my objectives and guiding me toward practical solutions. Her advice was clear, actionable, and made a big difference in how I approach strategy for my own personal development roadmap. I’m very grateful for her support and would highly recommend her as a coach."
Beata Green - CTO, Digital Transformation Manager
"Aimee’s ability to hear what you are not saying from what you are is unmatched, as well as framing the questions in such a way that they completely stop you in your tracks and make you see what is really going on."
Franka - Product Manager and Founder
Let's work together.
Are you interested in designing better products, services or experiences for your customers? Let’s chat!
Services.
We all have the potential to design a future that works better for everyone.
We shape our services and team around your organisation’s needs, with a clear focus on supporting your business goals. Whatever stage you’re at, we bring the right people and the right approach to make sure your vision becomes reality.
Customer Experience.
Building new services and improving existing ones starts with understanding your user’s needs. We help make meaningful experiences that help de-risk business decisions and create value for customers. From physical in-store experiences to online digital ecosystems, every touchpoint a customer has with your brand needs to be designed and aligned with the organisation’s values.
User research, trends, analogous inspiration, and markets
Explore strategic areas of opportunity and growth
Understand customers lifecycles
End-to-end interactions and user experience
Visioning, value propositioning, business modelling
Service design.
Visualising interactions, end-to-end experiences, and mapping areas of opportunity. Facilitating remote design sprints. Co-designing with teams to prototype concepts and shape ideas into tangible forms. Focused approaches for designing, developing and testing a product or service to create, build and test opportunities for big challenges at speed and with less risk
Current and future state service blueprints and systems thinking
Collaboration, co-design, and workshops
Prototyping concepts and service ecosystems
Journey mapping and user stories
Product design sprints.
A one-week design sprint is a focused approach for designing, developing and testing a product or service to create, build and test opportunities for big challenges at speed and with less risk.Design sprints are used for product development, business strategy and customer experience.
Exploring and making with cross-functional teams
Generating lots of ideas quickly
Prototyping and testing new concepts
Business and product validation
> Read about Design sprints
Leadership Coaching.
Supporting leaders in enabling positive team culture and psychological safety. Supporting leaders and enabling teams with skills, behaviours and tools to support more agile processes and ways of working. Understanding and establishing culture through coaching and co-design. Encouraging access to individual leadership styles based on empathy, vision and trust.
Coaching new and existing leadership
Developmental models and frameworks
Exploring the Leader as a Coach
> Read about Leadership coaching
Let's work together.
Are you interested in designing better products, services or experiences for your customers? Let’s chat!
Coaching.
Great leaders aren’t born, they are developed.
Outside good leadership looks clear, bold and empowering but inside it can feel intense, uncertain and very messy. Leadership coaching empowers you to refine your vision, enhance your decision-making, and lead with confidence and authenticity.
Why Leadership Coaching?
Leadership isn’t just about authority, it’s about influence, adaptability, and emotional intelligence. A strong leader fosters innovation, drives performance, and builds a culture of trust and collaboration.The Intentional Leader coaching sessions are for purposeful leaders who want to lead with integrity, based on their values. We start by understanding who you are: your values, strengths, and what drives you. We’ll look at your past experiences to identify what you want to carry forward and build on. This will lay the foundation for your next steps.We’ll take a close look at areas where you feel stuck or unfulfilled, and create a vision for where you truly want to go. Together, we’ll also address any limiting beliefs, patterns or obstacles so you can move forward confidently. Whether you’re an emerging leader or a seasoned executive, personalised coaching provides you with the tools and insights to navigate challenges, inspire teams, and achieve outstanding results.
"Aimee’s ability to hear what you are not saying from what you are is unmatched, as well as framing the questions in such a way that they completely stop you in your tracks and make you see what is really going on."
Franka - Product Manager and Founder
Impact of Coaching
The value and benefits of coaching support to:
Gain clarity & confidence. Develop a strong leadership identity, refine your purpose, and lead with conviction.
Enhance decision-making. Improve strategic thinking, problem-solving, and agility in high-pressure situations.
Strengthen communication & influence. Learn how to inspire, engage, and align teams towards a common vision.
Navigate change & complexity. Overcome uncertainty, lead through transitions, and foster a growth mindset.
Increase productivity & performance. Optimise time management, delegation, and focus for maximum impact.
Create high-performing teams. Cultivate collaboration, accountability, and motivation to drive exceptional results.
How it works
Our coaching relationship is confidential, non-judgemental, and supportive in seeking the change you want to see. Coaching is a collaborative process where we will work together through personalised 1:1 sessions, we’ll uncover:
Deep insight & self-discovery. Uncover your leadership style, strengths, and blind spots.
Actionable strategies. Practical tools and frameworks to implement immediately.
Ongoing support & accountability Continuous feedback to accelerate growth and sustain success.
What’s included in a Coaching package?
A blend of developmental, Co-Active and transformational coaching
6-month coaching package
Additional support via email
One-off and subscription pricing available
Who is Leadership Coaching for?
Leadership coaching benefits professionals at all levels, including:
Executives & Senior Leaders looking to enhance influence and organisational impact.
Emerging Leaders transitioning into management roles with confidence.
Business Owners seeking to scale and lead with vision.
Professionals wanting to sharpen their leadership skills for career growth.
"Aimee was incredibly helpful in clarifying my objectives and guiding me toward practical solutions. Her advice was clear, actionable, and made a big difference in how I approach strategy for my own personal development roadmap. I’m very grateful for her support and would highly recommend her as a coach."
Beata Green - CTO, Digital Transformation Manager
Looking for support?
Are you interested in being a more intentional leader? Get in touch and let’s chat!
Design sprints.
Product design sprints help you move fast and design smarter, turn ideas into solutions at speed.
A design sprint is a focused approach to design, develop and test a product or service feature. It's a five-day facilitated design process with participation from cross-functional skills to create, build and test opportunities for big challenges quickly.
How sprints work.
Design sprints are used for product development, business strategy and customer experience.1. We start every sprint with a day of understanding. The starting point involves having pre-sprint preparation and a clear brief of the problem to solve. The research helps inform and clarify goals, map journeys and areas of focus.2. Then it’s time to explore opportunities and identify potential solutions. We use techniques that help us initially think big, and then help us narrow down our thinking to more tangible concepts.3. Generating lots of ideas and then narrowing them down fast. The team vote on aspects of each concept, and then the decision maker gets the ultimate vote.4. Taking a sketch-led approach to prototyping and making means creating artefacts that aren't limited to a screen or something digital. For example, you might produce a physical object that shows how a product might work, or something paper-based to tell a story, or straight onto a device with a lo-fi-coded concept.5. The value of this approach also comes from getting something into the hands of users fast. Testing means you start to understand where the value is in your prototype. The feedback and outcomes help shape your design and provide you with further insight about where to go next.No matter what the size of the organisation, or what the problem is, a design sprint is a good way to mitigate big spending and quickly test a concept with users to see if it's viable before building anything concrete.
"This has been the most successful Alpha we've done because of the structure and sprints."
Jordan Bullen - Senior Interaction Designer, Ministry of Justice
> Read more
What's included.
1/2 day writing a clear brief
1/2 day project charter kick-off
Asset collation and pre-sprint prep
1 day discovery and opportunity mapping
2 days ideation, sketching and decision-making
2 days prototyping and testing
Follow-up session
"Aimee has firsthand experience of a plethora of tools and methods at her disposal, which allows her to understand exactly what to do and when."
Phil Hesketh - Founder, Consent Kit
> Read more
Ready to sprint?
Are you interested in a design sprint to generate ideas and validate them quickly? Let’s chat!
Work.
Applying design thinking, doing, and being with organisations that do good in the world.
We partner with organisations driven by purpose and possibility, bringing together design thinking, strategic action, and authenticity to help good work become great.
Ministry of Justice - Probation Digital Strategy
Partnering with senior managers, the work focused on translating the Probation Digital vision into a clear and actionable delivery strategy. This was about more than setting direction, it was about bridging ambition with reality and ensuring a shared understanding of what success looked like. Through workshops, discussions, and close collaboration, leaders were supported in clarifying priorities, aligning teams around common goals, and mapping out the practical steps needed to move from vision to impact. The result was a strategy that not only guided delivery but also built confidence and momentum across the organisation.
Ways of working facilitation and design
Strategy and service design
Product design sprints
User research in prisons
Other projects with the Ministry of Justice include:
Service design of Reducing Reoffending service area for prison and probation staff.
Candidate Matching education service - Pivot award winner.
Digital Prison Service Connected Service area - Navigation services.
Good Things Foundation - Digital Inclusion and Employability
Supporting Good Things Foundation and partner centres to enable digital inclusion and employment in diverse communities. The work focused on bringing community voices into the co-design of digital skills for employability, while creating a more strategic approach to working with funders and community centres. This ensured better support and training for digitally excluded people seeking to improve their skills to access work opportunities.
User research, digital skills mapping and strategy
Service model development
Group facilitation and design leadership for culture and inclusion
By working closely with community centres and learners, the project translated lived experiences into an actionable Digital Skills for Employability playbook, while also equipping funders and charities with insights and resources to make better-informed decisions.
UKHSA - Experience Strategy for Health Services
Senior leaders were supported to make customer experience a core part of Covid services, while also planning for how those services would operate beyond the pandemic. The work looked at both policy and service design, focusing on practical changes that made healthcare easier to use, fairer, and more effective. The result was a clearer direction for services that could meet urgent needs while also setting the foundation for future improvements.
Customer Experience strategy and service design leadership
Service modelling and service catalogue architecture
As part of this work, services were catalogued to show what was in place, what worked, and where improvements were needed. At the same time, the Covid service journey was mapped to capture the experience of both patients and staff. These insights equipped leaders and policy makers with the clarity needed to make practical decisions and design services that met immediate demands while preparing for long-term change.
Co-op - Service Design and Business Transformation
Senior Leaders and the Operating Model team were supported to explore how service design could reduce costs, improve efficiency, and create better experiences for both customers and colleagues. Collaboration with the Digital Skills team focused on designing remote workshops that built service design capability across One Co-op, equipping colleagues with practical tools and methods to drive positive change.
Leadership engagement
Championing a service design mindset, approach, and toolkit to the wider team
User research and stakeholder interview sessions
Mapping end-to-end journeys
Designing, prototyping and testing remote learning experience
The work helped leaders understand and define both the current (“as is”) and future (“to be”) states, while supporting the early strategy for business optimisation. A Lean Service methodology was applied across existing services to improve effectiveness and deliver better outcomes.Other projects working with Co-op include:
Funeralcare Customer Experience
Enabling Functions Payroll service
"Aimee is an incredibly talented designer and a fabulously supportive team member. She’s great at getting people engaged and excited about the design process without them realising they are doing it. She’s also incredibly productive and keeps everyone’s energy up by asking powerful questions and steering us all in the right direction."
Cara Bermingham - Head of Delivery, Co-op
> Read more
More projects include:
Design projects:
Helping Consent Kit to support teams to keep track of data and empower researchers for best practices in ethical consent. Clarifying product vision, strategy, and delivery with founders. Creating a frictionless onboarding journey for new customers.
Enabling an independent global charitable foundation to win a £200 million bid to fund research into mental health by applying design to their business development.
Researching, conceptualising and prototyping a product to support positively changing the path of chronic illness and mental well-being.
Facilitating strategy and product design sprints for new ventures and existing legacy systems with UK Government.
Saving pharmacies time and cost by simplifying and redesigning a complex paper-based prescription management system into an efficient workflow supported by digital tools.
Service re-design of blood donor centres in the UK, the prototype site leading to 7,500 more units of donated blood in the first year and 22,000 lives saved or improved.
Design advisor for Jam and Justice, a project facilitated by Amity, looking at the evidence, desirability, feasibility, and viability for digital democratic innovations that support women’s engagement in policy initiation and design.
Co-founder and event organiser of SheSaysMCR, encouraging women to share their stories.
Contributor to This is Service Design Doing book, a practitioner’s resource and guide to applying service design in organisations.
Contributor to the Product Design Career Workbook, a book for leaders and designers looking to reflect on and develop their career
Coaching projects:
Zinc Ventures - Supporting the cohort of talented Founders to build commercial, scalable businesses that tackle one of the toughest problems society faces today - the environment.
Coaching Assistant with Co-Active coaching courses, supporting remote learning for global cohorts in the principles of Co-Active coaching. Group learning and one-on-one sessions with aspiring coaches.
Supporting 100+ new practitioners in design, aspiring freelancers, coaches, and product leaders with mentoring on Amazing Design People List. A Top 50 mentor in Service Design and Top 10 mentor in Business Transformation.
Case studies available on request.
Let's work together.
Are you interested in designing better products, services or experiences for your customers? Let’s chat!
Working together.
We all have the power to design and make the world simpler, smarter, and kinder.
Apply Design was created in 2019 by Aimee Tasker, a leadership coach, and strategic design consultant. She can work independently on a freelance or project basis. She also works with and can bring other lovely consultants on board to deliver projects when needed.
Aimee has supported many teams in designing services, products, and better ways of working. She’s worked in a wide array of sectors involving healthcare, finance, retail, ethics and social good. Some organisations include Wellcome Trust, the Ministry of Justice, the UK Health Security Agency, Good Things Foundation, NHS, Co-op and many more independent start-ups and large businesses.
Making change happen is integral to Aimee’s values and one of the reasons she founded Apply Design. She is also a certified Co-Active professional coach (CPCC) and Professional Certified Coach (PCC) through the International Coaching Federation. Having coached over 50+ individual leaders from Google, IBM, Lululemon, Nesta, and more, she supports growth and transformation for curious leaders open to exploring new ways of doing and being.Some fun facts:
Working in transformation for 15+ years with a previous career in media production.
Worked with 100+ leaders from Google to Government, agencies and startups.
Coached leaders globally from 25+ countries.
Certified Co-Active Professional Coach (CPCC).
Professional Certified Coach (PCC) by International Coaching Federation (ICF).
First-class Digital Management Master’s degree with Hyper Island.
Contributions to chapters in This is Service Design Doing book and Product Design Career Workbook.
Let's work together.
Are you interested in designing better products, services or experiences for your customers? Let’s chat!