Teodora Vance

Curriculum vitae — October 2026

Teodora Vance

Service & product designer

I design the parts of a service that usually get left to chance: the intake form, the eligibility rules, the handoff between two teams who have never met. Ten years of it, mostly in housing, health and logistics.

Email Teodora

Based
Rotterdam · remote across CET ±3
Availability
Open to a lead role from February 2027
Focus
Intake, eligibility and scheduling systems

Profile

What I take on

I work on services where the difficulty sits in the middle — multi-step applications, rules that change by region, queues that nobody owns. My method is unglamorous: sit with the people doing the work, map what actually happens, then redesign the smallest piece that unblocks the rest.

I lead discovery and design end to end, write the content as carefully as the interface, and prefer a rough prototype in front of a real applicant over a polished deck. I am most useful to teams that have inherited a system they no longer understand.

Selected work

Three engagements

Longer write-ups, research artefacts and before/after walkthroughs are available on request.

  • Rehousing intake, rebuilt around one conversation

    2025 — 2026

    Mid-Rivers Housing Trust · Lead service designer

    Applicants were repeating the same circumstances to four teams. I mapped the full intake with caseworkers, consolidated eleven forms into a single guided assessment, and rewrote the eligibility questions in plain language with a legal reviewer in the room. Caseworkers now open a file that is already complete, and a rejected applicant receives a reason they can act on.

    • Service blueprint
    • Content design
    • Frontline research
    • Accessibility review

  • A benefits companion that admits what it does not know

    2024

    Kinfold Advice Network · Designer and researcher

    An advice charity wanted a self-serve eligibility checker. Testing showed confident answers were the risk, not the feature, so I designed a tool that returns a short range, names the assumptions behind it, and routes anyone near a threshold to a human adviser. Advisers helped write every fallback message.

    • Prototyping
    • Decision logic
    • Usability testing
    • Plain language

  • Field scheduling for crews who lose signal

    2022 — 2023

    Atlas Grid Services · Senior designer, scheduling platform

    Dispatchers and field crews were keeping two parallel versions of the day. I rode along on shifts for three weeks, then designed an offline-first job card and a dispatch view that shows which crews have not yet synced. The paper backup sheet quietly fell out of use within two cycles.

    • Contextual research
    • Offline-first flows
    • Design system work
    • Facilitation

Experience

Employment history

  • 2023 —
    present

    Independent practice

    Vance Design Practice · Rotterdam

    • Lead discovery and service design engagements for housing trusts, advice charities and two logistics operators, usually embedded in the client team.
    • Hand over working design systems and research repositories so the team can keep going without me, and run a short review six months later.

  • 2020 — 2023

    Lead service designer

    Northline Digital · Utrecht

    • Led a four-person design group across public-sector delivery contracts, setting research standards and reviewing every piece of applicant-facing content.
    • Introduced accessibility checks into the definition of done and trained engineers to run them, which moved audits from launch week to pull requests.

  • 2017 — 2020

    Product designer

    Halden Health · Amsterdam

    • Designed referral and triage tooling used by clinic coordinators, working from observation sessions in three partner clinics.
    • Built the first shared component library and the pattern documentation that the product team still extends.

  • 2015 — 2017

    UX designer

    Brightsill Studio · Leeds

    • Ran interviews, wireframes and usability sessions across client projects in education, transport and membership services.
    • Started the studio's weekly critique and its first plain-language writing guide.

How I work

Three habits worth knowing about

Start at the counter

The first week is spent with the people who absorb the current design's failures. Their workarounds are the specification.

Write it before drawing it

If the question, the error and the refusal cannot be written clearly, the flow is not ready. Content comes first, layout second.

Leave it maintainable

Documented patterns, named decisions and a research archive the team can search. Nothing that depends on me being in the room.