Ally

Ally is a B2B mobile training platform designed to equip frontline staff in hospitality, retail, and service environments with the skills to recognise, respond to, and report harassment and abuse. Available on iOS and Android, the platform delivers scenario-based training modules tailored to real situations frontline workers encounter, turning passive awareness into active capability.

Partners include Adidas, Hyatt, Unilever, WeWork, Google, and Sephora Thailand. The platform was featured by UN Women as part of a broader commitment to workplace safety in service industries. Ally launched in July 2021 and has trained over 1,000 staff across London, Berlin, and Bangkok.

Harassment and abuse in public-facing workplaces is widespread and underreported. Frontline staff, who are most frequently affected, are also least likely to have received training on how to respond safely and effectively. Traditional training formats, whether classroom-based or e-learning, rarely fit the reality of their working lives: shift-based, time-pressured, and often delivered in a second language.

Ally's brief was to design a mobile training platform that fit into these lives rather than asking staff to adapt to it. The content needed to be credible, immediately applicable, and emotionally intelligent. The product needed to work within enterprise B2B environments while serving individual employees whose engagement with the platform was voluntary and driven by personal relevance rather than compliance.

As the UX/UI Designer, I was responsible for the end-to-end product experience from research through to shipped design, covering user research, information architecture, interaction design, and visual UI for both iOS and Android.

Research & Insight

I led research with frontline workers across hospitality and retail to understand how harassment and abuse manifested in their specific contexts, how they currently responded, and what made existing training feel irrelevant or patronising. Interviews surfaced a consistent theme: staff knew situations were wrong but lacked a clear framework for action, and existing resources were too generic to be useful in the moment. These insights shaped the scenario-based content model and the tone of every interaction within the app.

Onboarding & Access

Enterprise B2B onboarding introduces a specific challenge: the product is purchased by organisations, but used by individuals who had no say in the decision. Designing for this meant making the first experience feel genuinely relevant to the individual rather than another compliance checkbox. I designed an onboarding flow that established personal relevance early, connected training to real situations the user recognised, and made it easy to return after a break in engagement.

Scenario-Based Training Modules

The core product experience was built around scenario-based modules presenting realistic situations and asking users to make decisions. I designed the interaction model for these modules, covering how scenarios were presented, how choices were framed, how feedback was delivered, and how progress was tracked. The central design challenge was making feedback feel instructive rather than judgmental, particularly for emotionally charged subject matter where users needed to feel supported rather than tested.

Multi-Language & Cultural Adaptation

With deployments across London, Berlin, and Bangkok, the platform needed to work across languages and cultural contexts where norms around confrontation, authority, and disclosure vary significantly. I designed a system that allowed content to be adapted per market without fracturing the product experience, maintaining a consistent interaction model while accommodating significant variation in language, tone, and scenario context.

Reporting & Manager Dashboard

Beyond individual training, Ally provided organisations with visibility into engagement and completion. I designed the manager-facing reporting layer, balancing the organisation's need for accountability data with the individual's expectation that their training activity would not be used punitively.

Designing for Emotionally Charged Subject Matter

Harassment and abuse training requires particular care in how scenarios are framed, how choices are presented, and how feedback is delivered. Getting this wrong risks retraumatising users, reinforcing victim-blaming narratives, or making the training feel clinical and distancing. Every interaction was designed with this risk in mind, with specific attention to language, pacing, and the emotional register of feedback.

Voluntary Engagement in a Mandatory Context

Ally sits in the uncomfortable middle ground between compliance training, which people do because they have to, and consumer apps, which people use because they want to. Designing for genuine engagement required making the product feel personally relevant from the first session and maintaining that relevance across repeated use. This influenced how modules were structured, how progress was communicated, and how the product spoke to its users.

Cross-Cultural Deployment

Norms around confrontation, authority, and disclosure vary significantly between the UK, Germany, and Thailand. A training module that feels empowering in one context can feel presumptuous or culturally inappropriate in another. Designing for this required close collaboration with local content experts and a product architecture flexible enough to accommodate meaningful variation without creating separate products per market.

Enterprise Deployment at an Individual Scale

B2B products are usually designed for the person who bought them, not the person who uses them. Ally was purchased by HR teams and deployment managers, but experienced by frontline staff who had no role in that decision. Keeping the individual employee at the centre of design decisions, rather than the enterprise buyer, was a constant discipline throughout the project.

Ally launched in July 2021, with training deployed across London, Berlin, and Bangkok. Over 1,000 frontline staff have completed training through the platform, with partners spanning hospitality, retail, and corporate environments.

The platform was featured by UN Women as part of their work on workplace safety in service industries, providing external validation of Ally's approach and its relevance to the broader effort to make frontline workplaces safer for the people working in them.