Adam Atteia / Twenty years in practice
I help teams simplify complex programs and land lasting change. I hand the pen to those who’ll resist it, so what’s built is a future they own.
The work isn’t the interface. It’s the problem underneath it, and the people who’ll live with whatever gets built. I bring them in early enough to shape it and then own it.
My work spans UX, service design, business analysis, and discovery. After twenty years, the title still matters less to me than the outcome: a change people understand, can use, and will carry forward.
How I think
The person most resistant to a new system usually understands the old one better than anyone in the room, including the parts that are broken and the workarounds that keep things moving. I don’t try to win that argument. I hand them the pen. When people help build the thing that replaces what they know, they stop defending what came before, and the alignment holds after the room empties. Your hardest stakeholder becomes your strongest advocate.
Procurement, classification, legacy infrastructure, legislation, a committee that’s seen three attempts fail before mine. None of that is in the way of good work. It’s what good work has to fit inside. I map the immovables first and design within them, not around them.
A screen is the easy part. The hard part is the operating model underneath it: the data rules, the decisions, the edge cases nobody wrote down. I resolve those first, because a polished interface over unresolved logic just hides the problem until it gets expensive. And that resolved substance is what I leave behind, not something that works on launch day and then needs me, but the artefacts and shared understanding a team needs to run it and grow it themselves.
Where I’ve done it
ANZ, Telstra, Bupa: complex organisations with legacy systems, regulated operating environments, and the particular challenge of designing for scale.
Department of Defence: classified environments, strict information handling, stakeholders with low tolerance for ambiguity or rework.
Australian Electoral Commission: high-reliability systems with non-negotiable election timelines and complex operational workflows across national, state, and divisional levels.
Therapeutic Goods Administration, Department of Agriculture: environments where interface decisions have downstream compliance implications and user error carries regulatory risk.
DFAT: global user bases, classification-sensitive environments, staff operating across dozens of countries and contexts.
Delivered directly and through global consultancies, across Australian government and enterprise.
What my work has produced
A utility portal redesign surfaced what the original brief hadn’t named: customers couldn’t tell whether they’d finished, so they phoned to check. The fix was completion confidence, not more features.
A biosecurity application replaced paper-based decision workflows for border security officers: fewer steps between seeing something at the border and deciding what to do about it.
A government referral portal redesign rebuilt the process around how applicants and assessors actually work, not how the original form assumed they did.
Stakeholder facilitation across a major electoral program modernisation, producing documented requirements that survived three rounds of scope change.
What my colleagues say
Adam’s ability to clearly articulate requirements, and to seek clarification from the client ahead of the build sprint, was crucial. — Mubin K., Government Consultant, Private sector
My most recent engagement was at the Australian Electoral Commission. I’m based in Canberra, NV1 cleared to 2029 and NV2 eligible.
Open to senior roles across UX, service design, and business analysis, in government and complex private sector environments.
AvailableNV1 to 2029NV2 eligibleSenior UXService designBusiness analysis