Making surethe right thing gets done.

Thorarinn Johannsson
Senior Product Designer at Yazen
Digital healthcare, Stockholm
Get in touch

AI version of me. Questions are saved so I can learn from them. The real one answers email.AI version of me. Questions are saved. Privacy

At a glance

Working professionally since 2006
Product
  • Product direction
  • Discovery and framing
  • Prioritising and trade-offs
  • Hypotheses and testing
  • Event tracking and success metrics
Design
  • UX and interaction design
  • Information architecture
  • Visual design and motion
  • Design systems (lead)
  • Brand into product
Making
  • AI prototyping
  • Front-end prototypes
  • Claude
  • Figma
Where
  • Healthcare
  • Banking and insurance
  • Consumer and B2B
  • First designer in startups

Where I’ve worked

Healthcare, banking, insurance and behaviour change, from early-stage to established.

  • Yazen

    Now

    Modern healthcare, delivered remotely.

  • SEBx

    Helps solo business owners focus on their trade by making company admin easier.

  • Lassie

    Rethinking how insurance works.

  • 29k

    Personal development built on scientifically proven methods.

  • Karolina Fund

    Co-founder

    A crowdfunding platform that remains a vital support for creatives of all kinds in Iceland.

Before product design I worked in web design, front-end and motion graphics. It still shapes how I think about interaction and quality.

How the work gets done

Finding what matters

Agree what should change before anyone draws anything.

And what we're leaving out. Otherwise the team ends up arguing about solutions.

Know what you've seen from what you assume.

Every decision I bring is marked: from users, from data, or a hunch.

Know when not to build it.

Sometimes the best fix is removing something, or sorting out the process behind it. Every feature is something someone has to maintain.

Seeing the whole

Look past the screen.

A problem that looks like a UX issue often starts in a process, an unclear owner or missing information. I'd rather fix the cause than redesign the symptom.

Get an engineer into the first conversation.

They spot the expensive parts early. Product, design and engineering share the problem, and someone owns each decision.

Keep the bar high with a system behind it.

I help lead the design system at Yazen and speak for Product in our rebrand, so the product and the brand end up feeling like one company.

Making it happen

Make it real enough to react to.

I use the lightest thing that can answer the next important question. Often that's an AI prototype that runs, and I do much of the design work in AI tools too. Then I check what it got wrong.

Make complicated things feel simple.

Dense information and tangled flows are where I like to work. Structure first, then the small details that make it feel right. I stay with it through the build so none of that gets lost.

Make the next step clear.

Nobody needs certainty to start. I break the ambition into the next decision, make it tangible and help the team agree on it.

The work I do best

I do my best work when things are still unclear: finding structure in messy problems and helping a team work out where to go next.

I've often been the first designer in a startup, so I'm used to stepping outside the usual boundaries of design. I'll prototype, dig into data, work through the product logic or get close to the code if that's what helps us move forward.