The mission
Hey, Peter here 👋
I'm a dad of 2, I live in a beautiful part of southern England, and I'm obsessed about product design.
Since 2019, I've spent most of my time as a UX consultant to some of the best companies in the world, and in my free time, I publish UX analysis here.
This is the Built for Mars story.
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UX consultant to some of the best companies in the world
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How it all started
🍀
FinTech exit
January 2018
My FinTech start-up, Movem, was acquired in a PE-backed deal. It was a company which I started while at uni, and 6 years later had created an industry-defining piece of technology. It's since been copied by everyone.
🙋♂️
Finding my feet
As most post-acquisition founders would attest to, I didn't know what to do with myself. So I started helping friends with their companies, and ended up focusing on user experience—something I'd spend tens of thousands of hours obsessing over at my start-up. This eventually turned into paid consulting.
🚀
Founded Built for Mars
December 2019
I was sat in a Costa, and thought to myself “I'm creating these UX presentations privately for companies, but I bet people would benefit if I could post them online". But because I’d signed NDAs with all my clients, I decided to do a mini-study on Rightmove.
🐣
The first few case studies
Private case studies are super detailed, and take me weeks. So it took me a few months to find a good balance of humour, memes, UX tips and a coherent story. That's why the first few studies aren't amazing—I even deleted a few of them.
💸
The bank study
January 2020
I released the UX of Banking—a 6-part mega study comparing banks in the UK. It went viral, and is probably how most people learned about Built for Mars.
🦄
Helping unicorns
Although I'd been working on Built for Mars full-time for quite a while, after the success of the bank study I made a conscious effort to improve how I ran the business.
This meant saying no to a lot of small design jobs, and focusing on helping some world-class products (Notion, Klarna, Pitch, Octopus Energy, Quickbooks, Google).
⚡️
Built for Mars v2 launch
May 2021
The original Built for Mars website was a Wordpress site I'd knocked up myself, and it was terrible. The irony of a UX blog having terrible UX was not lost on me.
So at the end of 2020 I asked my subscribers for feedback, and had hundreds of responses. I then started trying to design the best possible reading experience for my work. It's going to be the launchpad for something much bigger.
🤟
Joined Creandum
September 2021
I joined the VC Creandum as an entrepreneur-in-residence, as a UX advisor to some of the best product teams in the world.
🦁
Built for Mars v3 launch
April 2023
Since releasing v2 in 2021, Built for Mars doubled-down on features that enhance the reading experience, including UX Bites, UX Tooltips, Cheatsheets, Collections and more.
So, for 6 months we painstakingly rebuilt the entire site in React, and reorganised how everything was connected and referenced. This became the foundations for a launchpad of really dynamic usage.
Oh, and we launched it at 11pm, it was fine, and then sometime over night it completely died—product releases are fun.
Trusted by
more than 75 products
Radicant Bank
The audit is very insightful. I especially like your positive tone of voice which wraps the feedback so nicely in a gift!
Entain
The easy-to-follow storytelling format clearly works. It's kicked off a lot of discussion amongst teams outside of UX—exactly what I was hoping for.
Stacker
We were incredibly impressed by our UX audit – the insights and recommendations helped us challenge and reframe our onboarding experience.
Comparis
The analysis was presented in such a comprehensible and compelling way that we are already planning implementations.
Stripe
Engaging and thought-provoking. Peter's UX insights about products we build day in and day out but often don't analyse deeply were eye opening!
Stripe
Engaging and thought-provoking. Peter's UX insights about products we build day in and day out but often don't analyse deeply were eye opening!
Penfold
Our audit was a game-changer. The thought and level of detail was far beyond our expectations and drove improvements to our onboarding journey.
Elgato
Peter’s audit offered a fresh perspective on the UX of several of our products and proved invaluable in helping us better tell our product ecosystem story.
AJ Bell
Peter brings insight and intuition to your customer journey. He’s a one-man focus group!
Livi
Peter has, without a doubt, deep knowledge about UX best practices and his work was very insightful to understand the overall health of our product.
Free
Without Built for Mars, we’d be average, and our customers deserve better. These UX audits help us deliver a world-class experience.
Moonpay
The audit was incredibly helpful and allowed us to improve the UX significantly having a noticeable impact on conversion.
GoFundMe
Peter provided interesting ideas and feedback that highlight both his knowledge of product design and customer empathy.
Octopus Energy
The audit extracted insights, filled with discussions of best practice and actionable recommendations to feed back into our product.
Notion
The analysis was so insightful and detailed. He surfaced loads of new thinking and opportunities to orient people experiencing Notion for the first time.